PHYS 107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Linguistic Competence, Linguistic Performance, Pragmatics
Document Summary
What you know when you know a language. Linguistic competence: hidden knowledge of spoken language. Linguistic performance: the way that speakers produce and comprehend language. Performance errors: unable to remember a word, mispronouncing something, or jumbling word order in a sentence. Performance is what is used by linguists as a basis for making hypothesis and drawing conclusions about what linguistic competence must be like. Ignore imperfections in performance such as inevitable speech errors and focus on consistent patterns in their study of linguistic competence. Chain: information source, transmitter, signal, receiver, and destination. Interference in the chain of communication is called noise . What you know when you know a language: linguistic competence. Speech sounds: you can differentiate them from other sounds. Phonetics: see ch2: sounds of a language. Phonology: language specific knowledge about the distribution of speech sounds. Knowledge of phonology allows us to identify between reasonable combinations of letter that could be words, and combinations that could not be.
