Re: I know one when I see one

From: Wade Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Fri 01 Nov 2002 - 21:14:51 GMT

  • Next message: Wade Smith: "Re: I know one when I see one"

    On Friday, November 1, 2002, at 03:49 , joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:

    > To phrase it in Chomskyan terms, there is a distinction between
    > language performance and language competence. Language
    > performance is found in each instance of verbal discourse, and can only
    > reflect a part of the whole, which is the individual's language
    > competence, i. e. the internally stored knowledge of vocabulary,
    > definitions, semantics and syntax which comprise the individual's
    > command of the language/symbol system, and upon which the
    > individual draws to engage in each language performance.

    And that is a lovely paraphrase of the pemetic model, which states that there is enough distinction between competence and performance to call them two different things, and claims that only one of them, performance, is the unit of cultural transmission necessary for, and demanded by, memetic theory.

    - Wade

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