ABSTRACT
T he relationship between immanence and manifestation is the relationship between langue and parole, what Hjelmslev calls the distinction, more general to science, between the system and the process o f phenom ena: ‘for every process there is a corresponding system, by which the process can be analyzed and described by m eans o f a limited num ber o f prem isses.’ (1961: 8) Noam Chomsky uses the terms ‘com petence’ and ‘perform ance’ to describe this same Saussurean distinction, and his language is instructive in several ways. First o f all, it clearly defines a central problem o f linguistic phenom ena: the simple (and perhaps ‘m ysterious’) fact that by the age o f three or four hum an beings can understand and generate a seemingly infinite num ber o f utterances that they have never encountered before. This fact seems to call for Hjelm slev’s distinction between a system o f finite elements and a process producing vast (if not infinite) combinations.
