Pragmatics & Communication

Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning -- how speakers use language to accomplish social goals beyond the literal content of their words. A learner who masters phonology, grammar, and vocabulary but lacks pragmatic competence will produce sentences that are technically correct but socially inappropriate, confusing, or even offensive. This skill covers communicative competence as a learnable meta-skill.

Agent affinity: baker (sociolinguistic contexts, code-switching), bruner-l (scaffolding communicative practice, narrative)

Concept IDs: lang-listening-comprehension, lang-conversation-strategies, lang-intelligible-speech, lang-formality-register

Communicative Competence

Hymes (1972) introduced the concept of communicative competence as a response to Chomsky's purely grammatical competence. Knowing a language means not only knowing what is grammatically possible but also what is:

• Feasible -- can it be processed and produced in real time?
• Appropriate -- does it fit the social context?
• Actually done -- do speakers actually say this, or is it grammatically possible but never used?

Canale & Swain (1980) expanded communicative competence into four components: