Introduction

In his early syntactic work, Chomsky (1965) made a distinction between the linguistic competence of speakers – the knowledge speakers have of their languages – and their linguistic performance – how speakers use their languages. In fact, of course, linguistic performance itself derives from another, much more complex competence than our linguistic competence, namely speakers' communicative competence. The question arises as to what the relationship is between our linguistic competence and our communicative competence.

Within the theoretical linguistic paradigm initiated by Chomsky's work, it is held that a speaker's linguistic competence is represented by a grammar of the language, a device that generates all and only the well-formed sentences of the language (to model the speaker's knowledge of what is and is not a sentence in the language) and associates one or more semantic interpretations with each sentence (to model the speaker's ability to associate meanings with sentences). The communicative competence of any normal speaker, on the other hand, presupposes (a) a quite general ability to construct communicative plans, including, in particular, conversational plans, in an attempt to achieve one's (normally) nonlinguistic goals and recognize and identify the plans and therefore the goals of others and (b) an ability to produce and to understand plan-relevant messages (including utterances, silences, and other verbal and nonverbal behaviors). Whether the communication is linguistic or not will depend on what operators are employed to put a given plan into action.