Is the notion of linguistic competence at all relevant in Cognitive Linguistics?

Linguistic competence is a term we associate with Chomsky (e.g. 1965: Ch 1), who made the distinction between people’s knowledge of language (competence), and that knowledge put to use in real situations (performance). Competence is an aspect of our mental capacity underlying our use of language. Chomsky’s conception of linguistic competence is purely syntactic, while it is a more comprehensive term for lexicalists within the generative school of thought (Jackendoff 1997, Pustejovsky 1998a). They assume a modular lexicon and account both for the rules governing the structure of language (syntax) and the source and nature of the lexical material (the lexicon) that enters into the derivations. The modular lexicon is a set of lexical entries which contain semantic, syntactic and phonological information that is deemed necessary to parse a sentence. In the generative lexicalist view this information is intimately tied up with linguistic competence. This paper is meant to be a philosophical contribution to the theoretical problem of linguistic competence and to the problem of the linguistic/encyclopaedic divide. Linguistic competence, as it is understood here, takes the modular lexical definition as its point of departure. It does not only involve structural competence, but all information kept in a modular lexicon. The notion of linguistic competence rests on the assumption that people are equipped with a lexical component that holds linguistic information only. There is currently a lively debate going on about whether it is possible to distinguish between linguistic meaning specifications and nonlinguistic (encyclopaedic) meaning specifications. This involves one of the most intriguing issues in linguistics, i.e. what the relationship between language and conceptual representation really is. The notion of modularity is central to this debate: arguments for modularity in the generative camp and non-modularity in the cognitive camp. My purpose is to find out whether the notion of competence is at all relevant in a cognitive model, and if so, how we define it.