TY - CHAP

T1 - Performance and competence in usage-based construction grammar

AU - Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - While formalist approaches in the Chomskian tradition to language distinguish sharply between performance and competence in their modeling of language competence, performance and competence are considered to be in a mutually influential relation in usage-based models of language. Language competence, in the latter approach, is, much like in Dell Hymes’ notion of communicative competence, held to be experientially based in the sense that speakers establish their competence through inductive social-cognitive processes of schematization and conventionalization. Making a case for the usage-based definition of the language system, his paper explores the interplay between performance and competence in a construction grammar perspective in which grammatical constructions are considered meaningful symbolic units on par with lexemes, in relation to the [V until ADJ]-construction, based on a study of a section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The present study takes into account empirically observed internal and external patterns of usage in the description of this linguistic phenomenon, providing a usage-based constructional overview of the competence pertaining to this construction. The purpose of the present study is thus two-fold, aiming to provide a communicatively plausible account of this particular phenomenon and to show that, indeed, no satisfactory description of the construction which ignores performance-based data would be possible, as the construction itself is very much defined by external properties such as specific genre and register affiliations and a quite specific communicative function.

AB - While formalist approaches in the Chomskian tradition to language distinguish sharply between performance and competence in their modeling of language competence, performance and competence are considered to be in a mutually influential relation in usage-based models of language. Language competence, in the latter approach, is, much like in Dell Hymes’ notion of communicative competence, held to be experientially based in the sense that speakers establish their competence through inductive social-cognitive processes of schematization and conventionalization. Making a case for the usage-based definition of the language system, his paper explores the interplay between performance and competence in a construction grammar perspective in which grammatical constructions are considered meaningful symbolic units on par with lexemes, in relation to the [V until ADJ]-construction, based on a study of a section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The present study takes into account empirically observed internal and external patterns of usage in the description of this linguistic phenomenon, providing a usage-based constructional overview of the competence pertaining to this construction. The purpose of the present study is thus two-fold, aiming to provide a communicatively plausible account of this particular phenomenon and to show that, indeed, no satisfactory description of the construction which ignores performance-based data would be possible, as the construction itself is very much defined by external properties such as specific genre and register affiliations and a quite specific communicative function.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - construction grammar

KW - constructions

KW - usage-based grammar

KW - usage-based linguistics

KW - usage-based language models

KW - language competence

KW - language performance

KW - English language

KW - grammar

KW - language register

KW - genre

KW - register

KW - resipes

KW - corpus linguistics

KW - cooking terminology

KW - competence-performance

KW - cognitive linguistics

KW - covarying collexemes

KW - collostructional analysis

KW - principle of semantic coherence

KW - principle of semantic compatibility

KW - English grammar

KW - discourse-pragmatics

KW - Corpus of Contemporary American English

KW - American English

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 978-87-7112-187-2

SP - 157

EP - 188

BT - Towards a Multidisciplinary Perspective on Language Competence

A2 - Cancino, Rita

A2 - Dam, Lotte

PB - Aalborg Universitetsforlag

CY - Aalborg

ER -