Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Keywords

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The Competition Model
At the opposite pole from Universal Grammar come models which see language
in terms of dynamic processing and communication rather than as static knowl-
edge. These are concerned with how people use language, rather than with sheer
knowledge in the mind. One model of this type is the Competition Model devel-
oped by Brian MacWhinney and his associates (Bates and MacWhinney, 1981;
MacWhinney, 1987, 2005). This derives from psychological theories of language
in which L2 learning forms only a minor component.
Whatever the speaker wants to communicate has to be achieved through four
aspects of language: word order, vocabulary, word forms (morphology) and into-
nation. As the speaker can only cope with a limited number of things at the same
time, a language has to strike a balance between these four. The more a language
uses intonation, the less it can rely on word order; the more emphasis on word
forms, the less on word order; and so on. The different aspects of language ‘com-
pete’ with each other for the same space in the mind. The results of this competi-
tion favour one or other of these aspects in different languages. A language such
as Chinese, which has complicated intonation, has no grammatical inflections:
intonation has won. English, with complicated word order, puts little emphasis
on inflections: word order has won. Latin, with a complicated inflection system
for nouns, has little use for word order, and so on.
The competition model has mostly been tested by experiments in which people
have to find the subject of the sentence. While all languages probably have sub-
jects, they differ in how they signal which part of the sentence the subject is. Take
the English sentence ‘He likes to drink Laphroaig.’ What are the clues that give
away which bit is the subject?