according to Saussure, is to draw rules from a mass of confused
facts, i.e. to discover the regularities governing all
instances of parole and make them the subject of linguistics.
1.9.4 Competence and performance
According to Chomsky, a language user’s underlying knowledge
about the system of rules is called the linguistic competence,
and the actual use of language in concrete situations is called
performance. Competence enables a speaker to produce and
understand and 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 his supposed competence. Chomsky
believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than
performance. Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction
is not exactly the same as, though similar to, Saussure’s
langue-parole distinction. Langue is a social product and a
set of conventions of a community, while competence is deemed
as a property of mind of each individual. Saussure looks at
language more from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of
view than Chomsky since the latter deals with his issues
psychologically or psycholinguistically.