Language Competence and Performance: Understanding Errors and Recursivity

As a start, language has dichotomy, it can be divided into competence and performance regarding Chomsky's appreciation. Competence refers to a psychological system, not a set of conventions in a community of speakers. It is the individual speaker's knowledge of their system, while performance is the actual use of language. This suggests that the ability to make judgments of grammaticality is one thing, and performance is another. The former depends on competence. We all make occasional performance errors of various types, such as repetitions or stops by hesitations. The causes are multifarious. Even if you are competent in your language, you can make performance errors caused by tiredness, time pressure, and other external factors. We must remark that competence is never wrong. In this example, the speaker has missed the relative pronoun, but it does not mean that they lack the knowledge necessary to judge their own utterance as grammatically incorrect. In fact, we can notice that the speaker is a native speaker who would be able to judge his own utterance as ungrammatical. If they are aware of the error they have made, this shows that the error has not been caused by a lack of linguistic knowledge but by other factors. We know that because there are a few more errors, for instance, the speaker self-corrects himself at the beginning and they hesitate as we see with the "I" in the middle. That is because this example is taken from an oral presentation. These errors can be caused by external factors, maybe the speaker is not paying attention. But we know that these are performance errors because they use structures like passive voice or correct vocabulary. To conclude, the correct version of the sentence is: "About two hundred years ago we had ninety-five percent of people in this country who were employed in farming".

Recursivity: A Property of Generative Grammar

One of the properties of a generative grammar that accounts for combinational creativity is recursivity. Recursivity is a property by which a mechanism or rule can be applied any number of times to the output that it has produced in a previous application or operation. The rule that allows speakers to use a that-clause as a complement of particular types of verbs can be applied an indefinitely large number of times because the verb of the complement that-clause at one level can be complemented in turn by another that-clause at another level, and this mechanism can go indefinitely. What makes this possible is the fact that the input to this rule can also be found in the output. This is the essence of recursivity: the possibility to use the output of a mechanism as the input to another round of the same process. This opens up the possibility to create an indefinitely complex set of embedded syntactic structures: we can generate a complement clause that contains a verb which in turn can be complemented by another complement clause, and the clause can contain another verb complemented by a further clause that contains a verb which again is complemented by a that-clause that contains a verb which is complemented by another complement that-clause which contains another verb that is followed by a complement that-clause … and so on.

Phonemes and Allomorphs: Understanding Sound Variations

The sounds /v/ and /f/ are phonemes in English. They are similar phonemes as they are labiodental and fricative, however, /v/ is voiced and /f/ is voiceless. They occur in parallel or overlapping distribution, that is, they can share the same context. There are no distributional rules preventing them from occurring exactly in the same environment since they can actually produce minimal pairs. If there were any restrictions, they would be allophones, that is, different realizations of the same phoneme, which present complementary distribution, where language units cannot share the same context. Minimal pairs such as vein/feign, half/have, and leave/leaf demonstrate that the substitution of v/f changes the meaning of the words they belong to. Voicing is the distinctive feature that differentiates them. According to structuralism, linguistic features are distinctive as long as they allow a language unit to gain its value, that is, to distinguish itself from the rest. Therefore, voicing can be regarded as a distinctive feature and /v/ and /f/ as distinct phonemes, not allophones of the same phoneme in English.

Morphemes and Allomorphs: Understanding Meaningful Units

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in the language system, expressing either lexical or grammatical meaning. Allomorphs, on the other hand, are different realizations of a single morpheme. Their distribution varies, being complementary for morphemes and parallel for allomorphs. Allomorph variation does not affect grammatical or lexical meaning since they may convey a single grammatical meaning like past tense, plural, or indefiniteness. Allomorphs might be lexically or phonologically conditioned. They are phonologically conditioned when the surrounding phonological context causes them to vary. For example, the allomorphs of the {PAST TENSE} morpheme for regular verbs are /d/, /t/, and /id/. They all convey the meaning "past tense" although their form changes in pronunciation. Lexically conditioned allomorphs of the past tense can be found amongst irregular verbs like go (went), do (did), or buy (bought), where pronunciation is not related to the production of the allomorph itself, but rather a whole new lexeme becomes the allomorph, thus being lexically conditioned.

Structuralism: Understanding Language Units and Relations

According to structuralist linguistics, language units gain their linguistic value by opposition to other units within the system. For example, the phonemes /b/ and /p/ differ in the feature of 'voicing'. Similarly, the Spanish words hermano and hermana bear a relation of opposition based on the feature of 'gender'. However, if hermano is used as a generic masculine, their relation would be labeled as neutralization, as the masculine noun has the capacity to absorb both masculine and feminine genders. In English, brother and sister are opposed to each other, while the term sibling includes them both, which is called inclusion.

Prescriptive vs Descriptive Approaches: Understanding Grammaticality

Grammaticality refers to the fact that a given linguistic expression is possible or not in a language. From a prescriptive viewpoint, expressions are considered grammatical or correct only when they follow the sets of rules that apply to the standard of the language. On the other hand, from a descriptive point of view, any expression consistently used by a community of speakers and possible in the system is accepted as grammatical. The examples provided deviate from the standards of Spanish and English, but they are grammatical in their respective contexts. The relation between language and context is called appropriateness. The examples can be associated with different contexts, such as oral, informal contexts or regional dialects of English like AAVE or Ebonics.

Double Negation: Understanding Linguistic Logic

The example of "will not" and "no good" represents double negation. From a prescriptive perspective, it is considered incorrect in standard English due to mathematical logic applied to language. However, from a descriptive approach, it is correct because it is consistently used by speakers and all listeners understand the intended meaning. The example can be associated with contexts like AAVE or informal oral language.