A Semio-Pragmatic Approach to Communicative Competence: Navigating Shared Meaning in a Multimodal World

In pragmatics’ core lies the assumption that grammatical competence it is not sufficient acknowledge the broad-spectrum of language use. We must also consider communicative competence: whereas grammatical competence points to the ability to create and understand grammatically correct sentences, communicative competence relates to the capability to produce and understand sentences that are appropriate and acceptable in a particular situation. This paper suggests “communicative competence” is pertinent, not only on the linguistic signs (and second language acquisition theory), but on all the multimodal semiotic systems through which we accomplish our social tasks. This emphasizes the significance of linking communicative competence and pragmatics and see that relationship through a much wider, semiotic perspective. Suggesting the integration of the concept on the communication studies, I start by briefly distinguish linguistic competence from communicative competence, revisit its two main models, and approach “communicative competence” both from a linguistic and semio-pragmatic standpoints.