On the Boundaries of Linguistic Competence: Matched-Guise Experiments as Evidence of Knowledge of Grammar

According to the standard definition, linguistic competence, the object of study of generative grammar, is knowledge of language. As it is used in generative linguistics, however, knowledge of language is also a technical term, referring to some system of rules that determines the set of sentences in a language. As such, any linguistic knowledge that does not bear on the grammaticality or linguistic meaning of sentences is necessarily not a part of the systems that grammars are meant to model. The widespread adoption of this conception of the object of study appears to be partly due to historical accident. The notion of a language as a set of sentences comes from Formal Language Theory (developed by Chomsky and others). In 1955, Chomsky applied this conception of language to the study of natural languages and laid out a research program of building grammars that generate the appropriate strings. In this early work, the cognitivist position is not evident. Unconcerned with issues of linguistic knowledge, Chomsky was free to define the object of study in whatever way was convenient. Later, cognitivist theories of linguistic competence (including prominently Chomsky’s own) inherited and incorporated this definition of the object modeled by a grammar: they set out to describe the internalized systems that determine which sentences speakers will accept as grammatical.