Theory of Translation 1 Introduction

2.13.3.2 Linguistic Competence and Communicative Competence
Dell Hymes has formulated the concept of communicative competence as an 
extension of Chomsky’s notion of ‘linguistic competence’. Chomsky made a 
distinction between what he called ‘competence’ and ‘performance’. According to 
Chomsky (1965), competence is concerned with an ‘ideal speaker-hearer’ in 
‘completely homogenous speech community’ who know their language perfectly and 
are unaffected by irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations, distractions, shifts 
of attention etc. While ‘ideal’ and ‘completely homogeneous speech community’ does 
not exist in real life, performance is important.
However, the term ‘communicative competence’ coined by Dell Hymes is wider than 
Chomsky’s term. It includes our ability to use linguistic forms appropriately. In 
Hyme’s words, this competence is “integral with attitudes, values and motivations 
concerning language, its features and uses” (qtd. in Hudson, 219). There are two 
aspects of communicative competence. The first one is the overall appropriateness 
and the second is ‘speech act’. According to the theory of speech acts, a grammatical 
sentence may be a statement, a command, a request and so on. Similarly, two 
grammatically different sentences may, as speech acts, be request, as shown in the 
table: 

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81 
Types of Sentence 
Speech-act or 
Illocutionary force 
Examples 
Declarative Sentence 
Statement 
I shall be there tomorrow. 
Command 
You should leave this room at once. 
Request 
I would love some ice-cream. 
Warning 
That plate is very hot. 
Interrogative 
Sentence 
Question 
Who is there? 
Request 
Can you give me your pen? 
Exclamation 
Isn’t it wonderful? 
Command 
What are you laughing at?