25. What is the difference between competence and performance?
According to N. Chomsky, “competence” is the ideal language user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, and “performance” is the actual realization of this knowledge in utterances. The former enables a speaker to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. A speaker’s competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. So a speaker’s performance does not always match or equal his supposed competence. Chomsky believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than performance. In other words, they should discover what an ideal speaker knows of his native language. Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction is not exactly the same as, though similar to, F. de Saussure’s langue-parole distinction. Langue is a social product, and a set of conventions for a community, while competence is deemed as a property of the mind of each individual. Sussure looks at language more from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of view than N. Chomsky since the latter deals with his issues psychologically or psycholinguistically.
26. What is linguistic potential? What is actual linguistic behaviour?
These two terms, or the potential-behavior distinction, were made by M. A. K. Halliday in the 1960s, from a functional point of view. There is a wide range of things a speaker can do in his culture, and similarly there are many things he can say, for example, to many people, on many topics. What he actually says (i.e. his “actual linguistic behavior”) on a certain occasion to a certain person is what he has chosen from many possible injustice items, each of which he could have said (linguistic potential).
27. In what way do language, competence and linguistic potential agree? In what way do they differ? And their counterparts?
Langue, competence and linguistic potential have some similar features, but they are innately different. Langue is a social product, and a set of speaking conventions; competence is a property or attribute of each ideal speaker’s mind; linguistic potential is all the linguistic corpus or repertoire available from which the speaker chooses items for the actual utterance situation. In other words, langue is invisible but reliable abstract system. Competence means “knowing”, and linguistic potential a set of possibilities for “doing” or “performing actions”. They are similar in that they all refer to the constant underlying the utterances that constitute what Saussure, Chomsky and Halliday respectively called parole, performance and actual linguistic behavior. Parole, performance and actual linguistic behavior enjoy more similarities than differences.
28. What is phonetics?
“Phonetics” is the science which studies the characteristics of human sound-making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription, speech sounds may be studied in different ways, thus by three different branches of phonetics. (1) Articulatory phonetics; the branch of phonetics that examines the way in which a speech sound is produced to discover which vocal organs are involved and how they coordinate in the process. (2) Auditory phonetics, the branch of phonetic research from the hearer’s point of view, looking into the impression which a speech sound makes on the hearer as mediated by the ear, the auditory nerve and the brain. (3) Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear. Most phoneticians, however, are interested in articulatory phonetics.
29. How are the vocal organs formed?
The vocal organs or speech organs, are organs of the human body whose secondary use is in the production of speech sounds. The vocal organs can be considered as consisting of three parts; the initiator of the air-stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.
30. What is place of articulation?
It refers to the place in the mouth where, for example, the obstruction occurs, resulting in the utterance of a consonant. Whatever sound is pronounced, at least some vocal organs will get involved, e.g. lips, hard palate etc., so a consonant may be one of the following (1) bilabial: [p, b, m]; (2)  ]; (4) alveolar:[t, d, l, n, s, z]; (5)T, Plabiodental: [f, v]; (3) dental:[ retroflex; (6) palato-alveolar:[  ]; (7) palatal:[j]; (8) velar[ k, g]; (9) uvular; (10) glottal:[h]. Some sounds involve the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English [w] has both an approximation of the two lips and that two lips and that of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed “labial-velar”.
31. What is the manner of articulation?
The “manner of articulation” literally means the way a sound is articulated. At a given place of articulation, the airstream may be obstructed in various ways, resulting in various manners of articulation, are the following: (1) plosive:[p, b, t, d, k, g]; (2) nasal:[m, n,]; (3) trill; (4) tap or flap; (5) lateral:[l]; (6) fricative:[f, v, s, z]; (7) approximant:[w, j]; (8) affricate:[  ].
32. What is IPA? When did it come into being ?
The IPA, abbreviation of “International Phonetic Alphabet”, is a compromise system making use of symbols of all sources, including diacritics indicating length, stress and intonation, indicating phonetic variation. Ever since it was developed in 1888, IPA has undergone a number of revisions.
33. What is narrow transcription and what is broad transcription?
In handbook of phonetics语音学, Henry Sweet made a distinction between “narrow” and “broad” transcriptions, which he called “Narrow Romic”. The former was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the most minute shades of pronunciation while Broad Romic or transcription was intended to indicate only those sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language.
34. What is phonology? What is difference between phonetics and phonology?
“Phonology” is the study of sound systems- the invention of distinctive speech sounds that occur in a language and the patterns wherein they fall. Minimal pair, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonologist. Phonetics is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. A phonetist is mainly interested in the physical properties of the speech sounds, whereas a phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their semantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which from meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to from plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in one’s language.
35. What is a phone? What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?
A “phone” is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. When we hear the following words pronounced: [pit], [tip], [spit], etc., the similar phones we have heard are [p] for one thing, and three different [p]s, readily making possible the “narrow transcription or diacritics”. Phones may and may not distinguish meaning. A “phoneme” is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. As an abstract unit, a phoneme is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. For example, the phoneme[p] is represented differently in [pit], [tip] and [spit]. The phones representing a phoneme are called its “allophones”, i.e., the different (i.e., phones) but do not make one word so phonetically different as to create a new word or a new meaning thereof. So the different [p] s in the above words are the allophones of the same phoneme [p]. How a phoneme is represented by a phone, or which allophone is to be used, is determined by the phonetic context in which it occurs. But the choice of an allophone is not random. In most cases it is rule-governed; these rules are to be found out by a phonologist.