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Give Crystal David's (1985:59) definition of competence.

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Crystal David (1985:59) defines competence as a person’s knowledge of his language, the system of rules which he has mastered so that he is able to produce and understand indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. Within Chomskyan linguistics, competence is the implicit and abstract knowledge of a language possessed by native speakers. Thus in Chomskyan linguistics the notions of abstract and implicit knowledge stand out. Van Patten and Benati (2010) argue that this knowledge is implicit because speakers generally are not aware of this knowledge and even if aware cannot articulate its contents; and abstract because it does not consists of rules such as “verbs must agree with their subjects” but instead it consists of other syntactic operations that yield sentences that can be described as having verbs that agree with their subjects. They further assert that competence contains information that not only generates grammatical sentences but also informs speakers of what is impossible in their languages. For example the native speaker of English has competence that allows the sentences:
Ben thinks Mary ate what?
What does Ben think Mary ate?
But competence disallows the sentence:
3) What does John wonder who ate Mary?

francis1897 answered the question on March 8, 2023 at 08:59

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Give Crystal David's (1985:59) definition of competence.

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