The computational system, however, is not a new idea. The majority of work
in cognition is predicated on a computational model, so its application to lan-
guage seems intuitive and commonsensical. In its simplest form, the computa-
tional model of cognition posits that we process information and generate ideas
and language by putting small pieces of data together into larger ones. Some-
times this process is referred to ascompositionality.A useful analogy is the way
we form written words by combining the letters of the alphabet in principled
ways. The wordrun,for example, is composed by combining the lettersr, u ,
andn. We must note that “The idea that language processing involves combin-
ing small linguistic units to create larger ones ... [is so compelling that] few
people have been able to escape its allure” (Williams, 1993, p. 545). We should
not be surprised, therefore, to recognize in Chomsky’s (1995) computational
system a view of cognition that has dominated psychology for decades. What
makes Chomsky’s computational system remarkable is that it reflects what we
call “strict compositionality.” The product of composition is not only the form
of words but also their meaning. The meaning of an individual sentence, on this
account, consists of the combination of the individual words.
Competence and Performance
In all of his earlier work, Chomsky had proposedcompetenceandperfor-
manceas a means of accounting for the fact that people are prone to produce
errors in language even when they have developed grammar rules that will
produce only grammatical sentences. The MP retains the competence/per-
formance distinction, but the terms have different meanings. Linguistic
competence in the T-G model is the inherent ability of a native speaker to
make correct judgments about whether an utterance is grammatical; perfor-
mance is what we actually do grammatically with the language, given the
fact that a range of environmental factors can upset our delicate compe-
tence. In the minimalist program, competence is more closely associated
with Chomsky’s (1995, 2000) view that the language faculty and universal
grammar represent a “perfect” system for generating language. He stated,
for example, that the language faculty “not only [is] unique but in some in-
teresting sense [is] optimal” (1995, p. 9) and that “there are even indications
that the language faculty may be close to ‘perfect’” (2000, p. 9). This revi-
sion changed the notion of competence significantly, shifting it from gram-
maticality judgments to a constructive process based on biology.
Competence on this account relates to humans in general as possessors of
the language faculty, not to individuals.
NOAM CHOMSKY AND GRAMMAR 187