Page 49 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

26 Communication and Evolution of Society

I shall select and discuss these ideas leads, however, to an inter-
pretation that diverges in several important respects from the
understanding of Austin and Searle.

Three Aspects of Universal Pragmatics
The basic universal-pragmatic intention of speech-act theory is
expressed in the fact that it thematizes the elementary units of
speech (utterances) in an attitude similar to that in which lin-
guistics does the units of language (sentences). The goal of re-
constructive language analysis is an explicit description of the
rules that a competent speaker must master in order to form
grammatical sentences and to utter them in an acceptable way.
The theory of speech acts shares this task with linguistics.
Whereas the latter starts from the assumption that every adult
speaker possesses an implicit, reconstructible knowledge, in which
is expressed his linguistic rule competence (to produce sentences) ,
speech-act theory postulates a corresponding communicative rule
competence, namely the competence to employ sentences in speech
acts. It is further assumed that communicative competence has
just as universal a core as linguistic competence. A general theory
of speech actions would thus describe exactly that fundamental
system of rules that adult subjects master to the extent that they
can fulfill the conditions for a happy employment of sentences
in utterances, no matter to which particular language the sen-
tences may belong and in which accidental contexts the utterances
may be embedded.
The proposal to investigate language use in competence-theo-
retic terms calls for a reviston of the concepts of competence and
performance. Chomsky understands these concepts in such a way
that it makes sense to require that phonetic, syntactic, and seman-
tic properties of sentences be investigated linguistically within the
framework of a reconstruction of linguistic competence and that
pragmatic properties of utterances be left to a theory of linguistic
performance.*® This conceptualization gives rise to the question
of whether communicative competence is not a hybrid concept. I
have, to begin with, based the demarcation of linguistics from
universal pragmatics on the current distinction between sentences