Communicative Competence, Pragmatic Functions, and Accommodation

Communicative competence is that part of our language knowledge which enables us to choose the communicative system we wish to use, and, when that selected system is language, to connect the goals and contexts of the situation with the structures which we have available in our linguistic repertoire through functional choices at the pragmatic level. In making these selections, language users accommodate linguistic features both consciously and unconsciously in order to adjust the social distance between the producer and the receiver. When the goal is to communicate with a stranger, to engage in public discourse, the most probable functional selection is to choose linguistic features which mark one's discourse as being acceptable for public discourse, to choose standard English. In part, the feature selection will be unconscious, but to some extent it will be conscious, and will rely on those norms which are publicly discussed, features which incorporate regional and social distinctions as well as notions of correctness and acceptability. Because the selection and use of standard English involves a high level of metalinguistic awareness, it might best be characterized as a communicative level phenomenon rather than a feature or structural level one.