Communicative competence

Hymesseparated the native speaker’s knowledge about language into 4 categories: systematic potential, appropriacy, occurrence and feasibility.

a) Systematic potential

The native speaker possesses a system that has potential for creating a lot of language. This is much like Chomsky’s original competence.

b) Appropriacy

The native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given situation. A knowledge of language use is the knowledge of how to use language appropriately – how to get it to do what we want it to do in the right circumstances. Thus, a British speaker of English would be unlikely to invite a high status superior to dinner by saying ‘ Hey, d’you fancy a bite to eat? ’ since such language would be inappropriately informal in such circumstances. Equally, they would be unlikely to say ‘ I was wondering if you would be interested in partaking of a hamburger’ to their best friend. We can think of many more examples: doctors talking to patients use different language from doctors speaking to doctors about an illness. Adults do not speak to children in the same way as they speak to each other. Lecturers do not talk to 2, 000 students in a big hall in the same way as they talk to 2 of them over a cup of coffee.

The following variables would seem to provide some of the answer to the question what governs appropriacy and what factors can affect how we choose what words we use. They are: setting, participants, purpose, channel and topic.

· Setting is understood as a communicative situation we are in, some physical surroundings, usually a place, where we are when we use language.

· Participants are understood as partners of a conversation, interlocutors, taking part in a communicative act. Their age, sex, social status and professional position are taken into consideration when we choose words to speak with.

· Purpose is understood as communicative intentions of the speakers. Until we hear or see the speaker’s or writer’s words, we can’t be sure what it is that he is trying to say.

· Channel is understood as medium for transmitting information. It can be of 4 kinds: auditive, visual, sensor-tactile and situation-empiric. The first 3 kinds can provide our hearing and vision either separately or in complex. But any or all of them do not function if denied support of dynamic stereotypes, known as background knowledge, provided by a situation-empiric channel. The latter, in its turn, may be subdivided into global humanitarian background knowledge (e.g., mortal sins); national language background knowledge (all people of the same culture speaking their mother tongue, peoples of different cultures speaking the same state language); and previous background knowledge of the interlocutors (badge language, small talks, pep talks or the gist of a certain conversation shared by its participants).

Another aspect is a form of realisation of communication. It can be done either orally or in writing. It can take place face to face or over the telephone. Information may be broadcast or telecast. It can be directly addressed to a particular person or widely spread through mass media without a particular addressee.

· Topic is understood as a subject of communication, or what the words are about: whether they are about a wedding or particle physics, the latest film or childbirth, cigarettes or methodology – all this is of particular importance for our choice of words.

All these factors influence language users in their choice of words. For example, if the setting is a Catholic church and you are trying to talk to someone 3 seats away without attracting too much attention you may use as few words as possible. If your purpose is to inquire about your friend’s father you might say in a whisper ‘Your father? ’ Outside the church you might say ‘ How’s your father these days? ’ If you want to disagree with a close friend you might say ‘Rubbish! ’ But you would probably not disagree in the same way with someone you had just invited to your house for the first time. You would not use the same language, either, in written communication (a letter for example). With that channel of communicationit would simply not be appropriate.

Of course the choice of language will depend crucially on what your purpose is. If you want to apologise, you use apologising language. Although here again you will have to choose between ‘I’m sorry I’ve broken the glass’ and ‘ I’m afraid this glass seems to have broken’. If you want to ask someone a favour you may well say something like ‘ Could you possibly…? ’ Much of what we say, then, is conditioned by the purposes we have, e.g.: apologising, greeting, warning, offering, etc. Yet another deciding factor will be what you are talking about. This is obvious since if you are talking about the guitar playing, the vocabulary you use will be different from that of a conversation about newborn babies.

c) Occurrence

A native speaker knows how often something is said in the language. In other words, he knows how common a piece of language is. The more common a piece of language is, the more likely it is that it will be clearly understood.

d) Feasibility

A native speaker knows whether something is possible in the language or not. Systematic potential might possibly allow for a construction like ‘ He has been being beaten’, but a native speaker knows that this is not feasible or possible in real life. Again, there are no rules to say how many adjectives you may have before a noun, but at some point the native speaker will say that there are too many to make sense. It is no longer feasible. Adjectives are classified as denoting evaluation, quality, size, shape, age, colour, origin, material and function of an object. In theory, you could describe the gift you’ve got as a ‘ beautiful fragile small oblong old light blue Chinese porcelain floor vase’. In practice, a native speaker would omit half the adjectives, as the maximum number of attributes is five.

Obviously Hymeshas included categories that are very different from Chomsky’s original idea of competence, and his ideas are considerably more complex in their original form that we have represented here. But it seems clear that the native speaker does in some way know the rules of use Hymes talks about and that these make it possible not only for him to ‘get the grammar right’ but also to say ‘the right thing’.

The fact that rules of use have never been clearly stated need not, however, cause too much alarm. In a general way the discussion of appropriacy is suggesting that language is not an abstract system. In other words, people use language in context, in a real-life situation, and it is one of the jobs of the teacher, as a linguist and methodologist, to identify these contexts.