•.. صَالة المُنتدى ..

• Linguistic theory attempts to describe the way in which language is
structured.

Thus, modern grammarians who follow the ideas of Noam
Chomsky aspire to describe competence

- the implicit knowledge of language rules which enables us to generate an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences,
even when we have never heard them or said them before.

• By contrast, psycholinguists are especially interested in performance - in evidence of language in use.

• The hierarchical structure displayed in a Chomskyan tree diagram is a powerful way of representing the patterns which underlie language.