Competence, Communicative and Linguistic

The notion of communicative competence, proposed by Dell Hymes, emerged in reaction to the concept of linguistic competence put forward by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky distinguished between linguistic performance, or actual language use in context, and linguistic competence, or innate language knowledge. He claimed that only the latter was worthy of scientific attention. Hymes refuted this distinction and the disregard for performance, proposing instead a theory of communicative competence that sought to explain the rules underlying people's contextually appropriate language use. More recently the notion of communicative competence has been extended in research on interactional competence.