Complete the account of the field.
Chomsky distinguished a speaker's ______, their internalised knowledge, from their ______, what they actually produce. The level concerned with meaning in context is ______, and the level concerned with how a language organises its sound contrasts is ______.
Word bank: competence · performance · pragmatics · phonology · phonetics · semantics
Hints
- The first pair is knowledge against behaviour.
- The last blank is about the system of contrasts, not about the physical sounds.
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Chomsky distinguished a speaker's competence, their internalised knowledge, from their performance, what they actually produce. The level concerned with meaning in context is pragmatics, and the level concerned with how a language organises its sound contrasts is phonology.
The last two are the ones students most often swap. Semantics asks what a sentence means on its own; pragmatics asks what a speaker meant by it here. Phonetics measures the sound; phonology asks which differences the language treats as meaningful.
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