In Generative Grammar, what explains the divergence of a speaker’s linguistic competence from their actual language performance?

💡 Explanation:

Noam Chomsky introduced the crucial distinction between linguistic 'competence' and 'performance.' Competence refers to the idealized, unconscious knowledge a native speaker has of their language's rules (the underlying mental grammar). Performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations (the utterances, which often contain errors, false starts, and hesitations). The divergence between the two is explained by 'psychological constraints and errors,' which include non-linguistic factors like memory limitations, distractions, fatigue, and shifts of attention.