Autore: Chesi, Cristiano
Titolo: Competenza e performance: una distinzione cognitivamente obsoleta
Periodico: Sistemi intelligenti
Anno: 2012 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 241 - Pagina finale: 258

In generative linguistics, a clear distinction has been drawn between (linguistic)competence and performance, where the first is the abstract «speaker/hearer'sknowledge of his/her language» (Chomsky 1965, 4), and the second is the actualuse of such knowledge, which can be somehow restricted by memory/attentionlimits. In these pages, I propose that such distinction is unnecessary if we aim atexplanatory adequacy (in the sense of Chomsky 1965, i.e. we want to capture notonly what expressions are part of our language and which structure they have,but also why it is so): in fact, there are alternative ways of looking at standard«performance issues» that allow us to explain a relevant set of psycholinguisticdata otherwise teased apart from the core linguistic empirical evidence. As inthe mainstream linguistic frameworks, I will assume that any language (i.e.an infinite set of well-formed sentences) can be described as an intensional(mechanic) procedure that exhaustively predicts which sentence is part of thelanguage (or can be generated by an explicit grammar for this language) andwhich expression is not (i.e. it cannot be generated by such a grammar). Theproposed grammatical description (inspired by the recent Minimalist debate,Chomsky 1995; 2001), unlike other approaches (e.g. MacDonald et al. 1994,and standard minimalism itself), can predict asymmetries related to performanceissues produced by center embedding and relative clauses processing(§2 and §3) by implementing structure building operations in derivational,directionally-constrained terms: the main intuition is that the recursive processof phrase formation should operate Top-Down and Left-Right (as discussed inPhillips 1996 and Chesi 2004, §4, contra standard proposals, e.g. Chomsky1995; 2001). This seems to be not only explanatory adequate (§4.1), but alsocognitively plausible from the point of view of other high cognitive systemslike motor control (§5).




SICI: 1120-9550(2012)2<241:CEPUDC>2.0.ZU;2-1
Testo completo: http://www.mulino.it/download/article/10.1422/37900
Testo completo alternativo: http://www.mulino.it/doi/10.1422/37900

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