Communicative Competence

Abstract

The issues I want to discuss in this chapter are questions of linguistic theory that arise from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics pioneered, among others, by Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks (see Shuy 1972). What have we learned over the last decades by applying micro-conversational analyses to conversational data such as have only recently become available for systematic study through innovations in audio and video technology? What does the interactive approach to communica­ tion, which sees communicating as the outcome of exchanges involving more than one active participant, imply for the way we look at linguistic data and for our theories of grammar and meaning? What do conversational exchanges tell us about the interplay of linguistic, sociocultural and contextual presuppositions in interpretation? A key concept we need to reconsider is the notion of communicative competence. The term is a familiar one, coined by Dell Hymes (see Chapter 1 in this volume), to suggest that as linguists concerned with communication in human groups we need to go beyond mere description of language usage patterns, to concentrate on aspects of shared knowledge and cognitive abilities which are every bit as abstract and general as the knowledge that is glossed by Chomsky's more narrowly defined notion of linguistic compe­ tence. Among European social scientists the term has become familiar through the writings of Jurgen Habermas, who argues that an understanding of communication is basic to a more general theory of social and political processes. He calls for a theory of communicative competence that would specify what he terms 'the universal conditions of possible understandings.' But it is far from clear exactly what facts of human interaction such a theory must account for and how we can characterize the knowledge speakers must have and the socioeconomic environments that can create these conditions. Habermas (1970), in his informal discussion, relies on notions of what he calls 'trouble-free communication' and assumptions about sharedness of code which recall Chomsky's ideally uniform communities, as if under­ standing depended on the existence of a unitary set of grammatical rules.