>Second, I am intrigued by Mark Johnson's suggestion that the
>competence/performance distinction may somehow be rendered obsolete by
>probabilistic grammars. (Though perhaps I am misinterpreting what he
>wrote.) Certainly probabilistic grammars represent a way of encoding
>both of what would traditionally be called a competence-level
>description (the non-probabilistic structures of the grammar, defining
>a space of combinatory possibilities) and a performance-level
>description (the probabilities associated with different combinatory
>operations), but even as someone who is somewhat skeptical of where
>linguists traditionally draw the line between competence and
>performance, I'm not sure that probabilistic grammars make that line
>disappear. Rather, I think probabilistic approaches have the
>potential to do something that (IMHO) should have been done a long
>time ago: stop thinking of a complete competence theory as a
>*prerequisite* to working on performance, and instead recognize that
>the two are intimately connected. (Hawkins, 1990 has an interesting
>take on this same point, though not from a probabilistic point of
>view.)
I think it should be stressed that the question as to whether
"probabilistic grammars make that line [the competence/performance
distinction] disappear", depends very much on how one defines such a
"probabilistic grammar".
Sure, if a performance-level description is accomplished by a
probabilistic enhancement of a competence theory (e.g. by attaching
application probabilities to the productive units of this theory), the
competence/performance distinction remains intact.
On the other hand, if one views a person's knowledge of a language as an
extensive record of previous language experiences, represented as a large
corpus of analyzed utterances, by means of which new analyses (and their
probabilities) can be constructed out of parts of analyses that occur in
the corpus, one obtains a "probabilistic grammar" where the
competence/performance distinction has actually disappeared.
In this view, which I also defend in my dissertation, the only role that
can still be assigned to "language competence" is perhaps the definition
of a formal notation system for the corpus annotations, as a suitable
stylization of persons' "language experiences".
Rens Bod