ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—Humans acquire language and linguistic knowledge in a largely unconscious way (→LANGUAGE). Ferdinand de Saussure made the distinction between langue (language, a system of linguistic signs considered in and of itself and shared by the members of a linguistic community) and parole (speech or word, the virtually infinite set of written or spoken utterances produced by the individuals of such a community; →ORAL, WRITING). Noam Chomsky took up this distinction in generative grammar (→GRAMMAR), which he defined as a model of linguistic competence, or implicit knowledge, not of a community but of the ideal speaker-listener, independent of education, social class, or neurological state. Competence is what allows every native speaker of a language (that is, someone who has learned it “naturally” as his/her mother tongue, or at least very early in life) to have intuitions about the grammaticality of sentences, about whether or not they are ambiguous, about what sentences are paraphrases of each other, and so forth. For example, all native English speakers would agree that The toves gimbled the holes and The holes were gimbled by the toves are two ways of expressing the same thing, regardless of whether they know what toves are or what the verb to gimble means. Similarly, when given an unknown string of letters, a native speaker has a hunch about whether it could be a word in the language, and perhaps even what forms could be derived from it.
