**** Communicative competence

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Communicative competence, one of the foundations upon which his ethnography of speaking is based, seeks an "explanatory adequacy" that

"leads from what is common to all human beings and all languages toward what particular communities and persons have made of their means of speech. It is comparative and evolutionary in a sociocultural, rather than a biological, sense. It sees as in need of explanation the differential elaboration of means of speech and of speech itself."

To Hymes, the acquisition of a grammar alone is insufficient for operating linguistically within a particular speech community. Communicative competence is a theoretical tool crucial to having a "socially constituted" linguisticsa. As an example of the importance of communicative competence, he cites C.O. Frake's essay "How to Ask for a Drink in Subanum," where providing the correct grammatical construction will not get one a drink unless the attendant sociocultural milleau is negotiated properly as well.

• - Ethnography of speaking ..................... <[LINK]>
• - Socially constituted linguistics ................ <[LINK]>
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Communicative competence rejects the "autonomy of grammar" as posited by Noam Chomsky in 1965. Rather than relegating all social aspects of communication to the status of "performance," where they fall outside the domain of generative linguistics except as after-effects or additions, Hymes seeks to incorporate the social aspects of communication into the core of any theory of language. <[LINK]> Claiming that generative approaches are concerned only with structure, he called for the incorporation of functional concerns into the foundations of any theory of language. <[LINK]>

• - implications of communicative competence .... <[LINK]>
• - Structuralism and generative grammar .......... <[LINK]>
• - Hymes's social construction of language ........ <[LINK]>

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{<[LINK]> Hymes, 1966, "On Communicative Competence" quote from 203; and Frake, "How to ask for..." in Pride and Holmes; and Hymes "Scope...}