Communicative Competence: linguistic competence, socio-

linguistic competence, discourse competence.

Hymes (1966a) observed that speakers who could produce any and all of the
grammatical sentences of a language (per Chomsky’s 1965 definition of linguistic
competence) would be institutionalized if they indiscriminately went about trying
to do so without consideration of the appropriate contexts of use. Communicative
competence involves knowing not only the language code but also what to say to
whom, and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. Further, it involves
the social and cultural knowledge speakers are presumed to have which enables
them to use and interpret linguistic forms. Hymes (1974, 1987) augmented
Chomsky’s notion of linguistic competence (knowledge of systematic potential, or
whether or not an utterance is a possible grammatical structure in a language) with
knowledge of appropriateness (whether and to what extent something is suitable),
occurrence(whether and to what extent something is done), and feasibility (whether
and to what extent something is possible under particular circumstances).
The concept of communicative competence (and its encompassing congener,
social competence) is one of the most powerful organizing tools to emerge in the
social sciences in recent years.
Communicative competence extends to both knowledge and expectation of who
may or may not speak in certain settings, when to speak and when to remain silent,
to whom one may speak, how one may talk to persons of different statuses and
roles, what nonverbal behaviors are appropriate in various contexts, what the
routines for turn-taking are in conversation, how to ask for and give information,
how to request, how to offer or decline assistance or cooperation, how to give
commands, how to enforce discipline, and the like – in short, everything involving
the use of language and other communicative modalities in particular social
settings. Clear cross-cultural differences can and do produce conflicts or inhibit
communication.
Ultimately all aspects of culture are relevant to communication, but those that have
the most direct bearing on communicative forms and processes are the social and
institutional structure, the values and attitudes held about language and ways of
speaking, the network of conceptual categories which results from experiences,
and the ways knowledge and skills (including language) are transmitted from one
generation to the next and to new members of the group. Shared cultural
knowledge is essential to explain the shared presuppositions and judgments of truth
value which are the essential under girdings of language structures, as well as of
contextually appropriate usage and interpretation.
While referential meaning may be ascribed to many of the elements in the
linguistic code in a static manner, situated meaning must be accounted for as an
emergent and dynamic process. Interaction requires the perception, selection, and
interpretation of salient features of the code used in actual communicative
situations, integrating these with other cultural knowledge and skills, and
implementing appropriate strategies for achieving communicative goals.
The phonology, grammar, and lexicon which are the target of traditional
linguistic description constitute only a part of the elements in the code used for
communication. Also included are the paralinguistic and nonverbal phenomena
which have conventional meaning in each speech community, and knowledge of
the full range of variants in all elements which are available for transmitting social,
as well as referential, information. Ability to discriminate between those variants
which serve as markers of social categories or carry other meaning and those
which are insignificant, and knowledge of what the meaning of a variant is in a
particular situation, are all components of communicative competence.
The verbal code may be transmitted on oral, written, or manual (signed) channels.
The relative load carried on each channel depends on its functional distribution in a
particular speech community, and thus they are of differential importance in the
linguistic repertoire of any individual or society. Full participation in a deaf speech
community requires ability to interpret language on the manual channel but not the
oral, for instance; a speech community with a primarily oral tradition may not
require interpretation of writing; and a speech community which relegates much
information flow to the written channel will require literacy skills for full
participation. Thus, the traditional linguistic description which focuses only on the
oral channel will be too narrow to account for communicative competence in most
societies. Although it may cause some terminological confusion, references to
ways of speaking and ethnography of speaking should be understood as usually
including a much broader range of communicative behavior than merely speech.
The typical descriptive focus on oral production has tended to treat language as a
unidirectional phenomenon. In considering the nature and scope of communicative
competence, it is useful to distinguish between receptive and productive
dimensions (Troike 1970); only shared receptive competence is necessary for
successful communication. Knowledge of rules for appropriate communicative
behavior entails understanding a wide range of language forms, for instance, but
not necessarily the ability to produce them. Members of the same community may
understand varieties of a language which differ according to the social class,
region, sex, age, and occupation of the speaker, but only a few talented mimics will
be able to speak them all. In multilingual speech communities, members often
share receptive competence in more than one language but vary greatly in their
relative ability to speak one or the other.
Communicative competence within the ethnography of communication usually
refers to the communicative knowledge and skills shared by a speech community,
but these (like all aspects of culture) reside variably in its individual members. The
shared yet individual nature of competence reflects the nature of language itself, as
expressed by von Humboldt (1836):While languages are in the ambiguous sense of
the word . . . creations of nations, they still remain personal and individual
creations of individuals.
This follows because they can be produced in each individual, yet only in such a
manner that each individual assumes a priori the comprehension of all people and
that all people, furthermore, satisfy such expectation. Considering communicative
competence at an individual level, we must additionally recognize that any one
speaker is not infrequently a member of more than one speech community – often
to different degrees. For individuals who are members of multiple speech
communities, which one or ones they orient themselves to at any given moment –
which set of social and communicative rules they use – is reflected not only in
which segment of their linguistic knowledge they select, but which interaction
skills they utilize, and which aspects of their cultural knowledge they activate. The
competence of non-native speakers of a language usually differs significantly from
the competence of native speakers; the specific content of what an individual needs
to know and the skills he or she needs to have depend on the social context in
which he or she is or will be using the language and the purposes he or she will
have for doing so.

As in descriptive and historical linguistics generally, the study of language

acquisition in the past century has in turn focused primarily on phonology, syntax,
and semantics/pragmatics. As recently as the 1960s and early 1970s, theories of
language acquisition were emphasizing the biological or innate factors in the
process, and were relegating the social context of language learning to an
amorphous sociolinguistic milieu from which children somehow constructed their
language via primarily cognitive processes. Much attention has since shifted to
such topics as the functions that language serves for children, what communicative
strategies they use, and how these are developed and how input is structured in the
processes of social interaction: in short, the acquisition of communicative
competence. Ethnographic modes of investigation are essential if such basic factors
of language acquisition as these are to be adequately described and explained.
We can begin to understand the total picture of how language is learned only if we
examine the process within its immediate social and cultural setting, and in the
context of conscious and unconscious socialization or enculturation. We must ask
about the nature of linguistic input and sociolinguistic training, how and for what
purposes children acquire particular communicative strategies, and how language
relates to the definition of stages in the life cycle and to recognized role-
relationships in the society. We must seek to identify the differential influences of
family, peers, and formal education, and consider such matters as the beliefs which
the community itself (including its children) holds about the nature of language
origin and development.

Just as some innate language development capabilities must be posited to explain

the rate and sequence of children’s acquisition of phonology and syntax, we must
also assume that all human infants are born with the capacity to develop patterned
rules for appropriate language use from whatever input is provided within their
speech community. Even before a child has acquired language rules, infants
evidently are able to deduce a detailed nonverbal, cognitive “script” for how events
are structured or organized: e.g. “what happens when grandma visits, or how to
have breakfast with father” (Kessen and Nelson 1976).
Some commonalities may be found in the sources and nature of input, although
content is of course, culture-specific. Children are essentially participant-observers
of communication, like small ethnographers, learning and inductively developing
the rules of their speech community through processes of observation and
interaction. Sources of input for children vary depending on cultural and social
factors.
Linguistic input is also affected by family structure, and by residential patterns,
including who lives in the same house and what their roles are in the caretaking
process. The presence of a grandparent in the home influences the type of
linguistic input to children, particularly in the degree to which traditional lore is
transmitted in the form of stories, proverbs, songs, and rhymes. In minority-
language families, grandparents contribute to language maintenance and
multilingual development.
The quantitative aspect of language use to which children are socialized – he
taciturnity/loquacity dimension – is also obviously related to their linguistic
environment. Birdwhistell (1974) compared the median amount of talk per day in
Pennsylvania Dutch and Philadelphia Jewish homes. He found that talk ranged
from two and a half minutes a day in the former to between six and twelve hours in
the latter, although the amounts of actual new information transmitted in the two
types of families did not differ appreciably. Clearly the children in these contexts
were being socialized to very different styles, and to some extent, functions, of
speaking.

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society,
including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used,
and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology
of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the
language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society. While
the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts on
which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend. Speech community is a concept in
sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of people who use
language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves.
Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon,
distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit
groups like families and friends. Members of speech communities will often
develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.
Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits
are assigned a positive or a negative value which is then applied to the speaker.
This can operate on many levels. It can be realised on the level of the individual
sound/phoneme, as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation of the post-
vocalic /r/ in the North-Eastern USA, or on the macro scale of language choice, as
realised in the various diglossias that exist throughout the world, where Swiss-
German/High German is perhaps most well known. An important implication of
sociolinguistic theory is that speakers 'choose' a variety when making a speech act,
whether consciously or subconsciously.

Social network
Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social
networks in which language is embedded. A social network is another way of
describing a particular speech community in terms of relations between individual
members in a community. A network could be loose or tight depending on how
members interact with each other. For instance, an office or factory may be
considered a tight community because all members interact with each other. A
large course with 100+ students be a looser community because students may only
interact with the instructor and maybe 1-2 other students. A multiplex community
is one in which members have multiple relationships with each other. For instance,
in some neighborhoods, members may live on the same street, work for the same
employer and even intermarry.
A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to
the inter-personal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social
networks have been formed by the Internet, through chat rooms, MySpace groups,
organizations, and online dating services.

Internal vs. external language

In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal
language) and E-language (external language). In this context, internal language
applies to the study of syntax and semantics in language on the abstract level; as
mentally represented knowledge in a native speaker. External language applies to
language in social contexts, i.e. behavioral habits shared by a community. Internal
language analyses operate on the assumption that all native speakers of a language
are quite homogeneous in how they process and perceive language.External
language fields, such as sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not
the case. Many sociolinguists reject the distinction between I- and E-language on
the grounds that it is based on a mentalist view of language. On this view, grammar
is first and foremost an interactional (social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor
Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

Differences according to class

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the

study of language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the
geographic distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other
sources of variation, among them class. Class and occupation are among the most
important linguistic markers found in society. One of the fundamental findings of
sociolinguistics, which has been hard to disprove, is that class and language variety
are related. Members of the working class tend to speak less standard language,
while the lower, middle, and upper middle class will in turn speak closer to the
standard. However, the upper class, even members of the upper middle class, may
often speak 'less' standard than the middle class. This is because not only class, but
class aspirations, are important.

Deviation from standard language varieties

A diagram showing variation in the English language by region (the bottom axis)
and by social class (the side axis). The higher the social class, the less variation.
The existence of differences in language between social classes can be illustrated
by the following table:
Bristolian Dialect (lower class) ... Standard English (higher class)
I ain't done nothing ... I haven't done anything
I done it yesterday ... I did it yesterday
It weren't me that done it ... I didn't do it
Any native speaker of English would immediately be able to guess that speaker
1 was likely of a different social class thanspeaker 2, namely from a lower social
class, probably from a working class pedigree. The differences in grammar
between the two examples of speech is referred to as differences between social
class dialects or sociolects.
It is also notable that, at least in England and Australia, the closer to standard
English a dialect gets, the less the lexicon varies by region, and vice-versa.

Covert prestige
It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language.
However, in certain groups, such as traditional working class neighborhoods,
standard language may be considered undesirable in many contexts. This is
because the working class dialect is a powerful in-group marker, and especially for
non-mobile individuals, the use of non-standard varieties (even exaggeratedly so)
expresses neighborhood pride and group and class solidarity. There will thus be a
considerable difference in use of non-standard varieties when going to the pub or
having a neighborhood barbecue (high), and going to the bank (lower) for the same
individual.

Sociolinguistic variables

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and

interview them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables.
A commonly studied source of variation is regional dialects. Dialectology studies
variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their
associated features. Sociolinguists concerned with grammatical and phonological
features that correspond to regional areas are often called dialectologists.
There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a
population. They are: vernacular of a subgroup with membership typically
characterized by a specific age range, age-graded variation, and indications of
linguistic change in progress.
Variation may also be associated with gender. Men and women, on average, tend
to use slightly different language styles. These differences tend to be quantitative
rather than qualitative. That is, to say that women use a particular speaking style
more than men do is akin to saying that men are taller than women (i.e., men are
on average taller than women, but some women are taller than some men).

Discourse competence is used to refer to two related, but distinct

abilities. Textual discourse competence refers to the ability to understand
and construct monologues or written texts of different genres, such as
narratives, procedural texts, expository texts, persuasive (hortatory) texts,
descriptions and others. These discourse genres have different
characteristics, but in each genre there are some elements that help make the
text coherent, and other elements which are used to make important points
distinctive or prominent. Learning a language involves learning how to
relate these different types of discourse in such a way that hearers or readers
can understand what is going on and see what is important. Likewise it
involves being able to relate information in a way that is coherent to the
readers and hearers. Is the ability to understand and create forms of the
language that are longer than sentences, such as stories, conversations, or
business letters.

Discourse competence includes understanding how particular instances of

language use are internally constructed. For example, consider the following
text:
The Space Cadets ate the rocketship. It was delicious!
In this text, what is the meaning of the word "it"? You can figure out that
"it" refers to the rocketship previously mentioned because you have
discourse competence in English that allows you to identify the referents of
pronouns.
(I am going to add discourse cohesion exercises:1) scrambled sentences, 2)
drawing links between textual elements a la Halliday and Hasan)
Discourse competence also includes understanding how texts relate to the
context or situation in which they are used. For example, what is the
meaning of the word "in" in the following sentence (Examples are inspired
by Scollon and Scollon 1995): 
The car is in the driveway.
The pencil is in the cup.
Because we have practical knowledge that completes our understand of
language use, we know that the pencil is surrounded by the cup, but that the
car is (probably) not embedded in the driveway!

Now consider the following text:

The party was a blast! After Melvin opened his presents and everyone
played with his new Star Wars light saber, it was time to eat. Melvin blew
out the candles and the Space Cadets ate the rocketship. It was delicious!
Served with real astronaut ice cream.   Melvin's parents really knocked
themselves out this time.
Now can you see how the sentence "The Space Cadets ate the rocketship."
could be correct? What else do you have to know in order to understand this
text? Who is writing? How old are the people described? What kind of
event is described? You can interpret the sentence because you perceive its
coherence in the context of American cultural practices for children's
birthday celebrations.
What makes a text coherent often has less to do with sentence structure than
with text structure and out knowledge of the world. Consider the following
examples:
#1) The theoretical discussions are excellent. Brew in any coffee maker. If
you have questions about your symptoms call First Help. Sam wants to
know what twelve o'clock means. Miss Honey and her boyfriend Bruno
called to take the children for a picnic in the park. Where can you buy this
convenient flashlight?
#2) Phillip's Chicken Pie. Delicious and ready in two minutes! Three
tantalizing varieties available with your choice of noodles, mashed potatoes
or our special mushroom gravy. Complete on-the-go meals for the busy
gourmet! 
Which one of these stretches of language forms a coherent whole? What
kind of text is it?

Text #2 is more coherent than Text #1. It belongs to a genre of language use
we recognize as advertising.
Which example is made up of complete sentences?
Text #1 is not really a text at all! It is a series of sentences strung together
after they were taken from their original context (a linguistics book jacket, a
coffee can, a flier from an HMO, a conversation, a children's book and a
magazine ad).
Different cultures have different expectations for text forms and devices for
making texts fit together, and different ways of defining situations that
allow people to understand what is being communicated.
 
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