ABSTRACT
Language production-talking-is a facet of language performance. Its special properties may be set in relief against the backdrop of Noam Chomsky’s (1965, p. 3) famous definition of the subject matter of linguis tics:
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.
