road map into the individual’s linguistic knowledge, “The basic assumption is that there is a language faculty, some special aspect of the mind/brain which is dedicated to the use of language. The language faculty consists of a cognitive system which stores information, and various performance systems which access the information” (Noam 1).
One of Chomsky’s most revolutionary findings was that the corpus (language performance) was a poor tool for linguistic study. Instead, he argued that competence, our internalized knowledge of a language, is much more significant to understanding language and its mental mechanisms than performance which he viewed as external, and flawed, evidence that does not accurately reveal competence. A corpus is an external collection of utterances or performance data which he saw as a poor tool for modeling linguistic competence. If performance is a poor measure of competence then, Chomsky argued, it is impossible to determine external utterance is relevant to linguistics: “Linguistic theory becomes the study of those linguistic structures represented in the minds of speakers which constitute their knowledge of language. Linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology which studies the mental structures responsible for linguistic competence is just one of the interacting components which contribute to the production of linguistic behavior, so the latter can provide only a rough guide to the speaker’s linguistic knowledge” (Sgall 3). One of the hallmarks of Chomsky’s linguistic theory is that there is a universal underlying structure that is an inherent component of the language system. It is an interface level to Chomsky that separates the boundary between language and cognition.
Chomsky believe that we acquire knowledge through this innate faculty, though we do move from an initial state of the language faculty to an attained state. In the initial state, the language faculty of...