Introducing English Linguistics

competence
-based,
i.e. centered on the belief that language is mainly a property of the mind.
Other linguists have developed theories that are more 
performance
-
based, that is, focused on language use in social contexts. Still others have
attempted to develop theories that combine these two interests: that are
grounded in the assumption that language is a product of both the mind
and the social contexts in which it is used.
Noam Chomsky is the principal proponent of competence-based theo-
ries of language. Chomsky revolutionized linguistics (as well as philoso-
phy and psychology) in the 1950s by publishing a book, Syntactic Structures
(1957), outlining his theory of generative grammar, and by writing a highly
influential critique of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
(1959). Chomsky developed his theory of language during a period when