Performance-Compatible Competence Grammar

Half a century ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from recursive function theory. These were exciting tools that imparted mathematical precision, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics, to the enterprise of grammar construction. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the grammatical transformation, an analytic device which led to new insights about a vast array of empirical phenomena left unanalyzed by previous linguistic traditions. As the theory of transformations developed, so did Chomsky’s conception of linguistic theory. Transformational grammar was accorded the status of a theory of idealized linguistic knowledge – linguistic competence, to be distinguished from the more general study of language use (including the unconscious mental processes involved in producing and comprehending utterances), termed linguistic performance. The relation between these two notions, as Chomsky (1965:10) emphasized, is that “... investigation of performance will proceed only so far as understanding of underlying competence permits.” For all their initial descriptive success, however, linguistic transformations have proven rather intransigent. Early psycholinguistic studies based on transformational grammar sought to show a correlation between the psychological complexity of sentences and the number of transformations involved in their derivations. The initial experiments provided enough support for this ‘derivational theory of complexity’ (DTC) that Chomsky (1968) wrote “The results show a remarkable correlation of the amount of memory and number of transformations”. But this optimism was short-lived. Within a few years, the DTC had been largely abandoned. As Fodor, Bever, and Garrett (1974) observe: