Redefining pragmatic competence among modular interactions and beyond

Language is a perfect system that satisfies the conditions imposed by the external performance/interpretive systems, but how the external systems interact with the core syntax is partially understood. With reference to Chomsky’s dichotomy of grammatical and pragmatic competences, this paper tentatively reformulates an integrated model of pragmatic competence, consisting of an internal and an external part. The former originates from the interaction of the internal syntactic submodule with external but organism-internal submodules, such as semantic, pragmatic and phonological-phonetic modules, and among three external submodules, thus creating thinking activities. The latter refers to the interaction between all organism-internal submodules and organism-external sociocultural factors, namely, mapping the computational results of the organism-internal submodules into the specific sociocultural contexts in communication. Meanwhile, this paper assumes an organism-internal pragmatic module in the Conceptual-Intentional system, providing linguistic and socio-cultural pragmatic knowledge in the operation of the internal and the external pragmatic competences, facilitating both pure thought and sociocultural communications.