Topic

processes
Language and

Communicative
communication.

competence and

Disciplines dealing
with communication
linguistic competence.

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Topic 1

OUTLINE
INTRODUCTION

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1. LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
1.1. Theories on the origins of human language
1.2. Distinctive features of human language
1.3. Language and language systems
1.4. Language as the main means of communication

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1.4.1. The Communication Process
1.4.2. Decoding the code: interpreting the communicative intention
1.4.3. Principles governing the linguistic communication process
1.4.4. Two main channels in the linguistic communication process

2. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: DEFINITION AND FEATURES. HOW THE

CONCEPT EVOLVED

3. LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE: DEFINITION AND FEATURES. HOW THE CONCEPT

EVOLVED

4. DISCIPLINES DEALING WITH COMMUNICATION PROCESSES

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 Language and communication

INTRODUCTION
The concepts of “language” and “communication” can be approached from many
different angles as the various disciplines which have taken an interest in these issues show.
Nevertheless, and regardless of the orientation scholars may take to define both terms,

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they all agree that in order to communicate effectively and efficiently, human beings need
to develop communicative and linguistic –or language– competences.
While traditionally those two terms were thought to be exclusively connected to human
beings, more recently both scholars and the layperson have been talking about “the language
of birds” or “how dolphins emit particular sounds for communication purposes”, or even,
with the introduction of computers and the Internet, a great variety of computer languages

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and communication processes have been developed.
Interesting and insightful as those new perspectives are, for the purposes of this essay it
is best to focus on human language and communication. All human beings have the innate
capacity to use language but, how did humans get that capacity? what makes human
language “human”? what is the purpose of human language? how does language work in
the communication process? What disciplines have contributed to a better understanding of
human languages and communication? What inferences can be drawn for foreign language
teaching?
To answer those questions, the essay has been divided into three main parts: the first,
which covers language and communication, attempts to define human language and the
elements which make it up on the one hand and, on the other, how humans use language
for communication and how the communication process works. The second and third parts
deal with the concepts of Communicative Linguistic Competences, giving a definition of each
of the two, an overview of their main components following mainly Chomsky, Hymes, and
Canale and Swain as the originators of those terms and the CEF as the framework for the
teaching, learning and assessment of modern languages in Europe. The fourth part covers the
disciplines dealing with the communication process. The essay ends by giving a conclusion to
the topic together with some of the implications to be drawn from a foreign language teacher’s
perspective.

1. LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

1.1. Theories on the origins of human language

Language can be viewed from different standpoints. First of all, it can be seen as a
phenomenon each individual person acquires and develops seemingly without effort. It is
true that some individuals may not be able to “speak” because they have some problems
with their articulatory system, while others may not be able to produce “coherent language”
because of some accident or disease which impairs their performance. But leaving those
individuals with speech disabilities aside, all human beings are born with the ability to
produce sounds which combine to form words, which combine to make sentences, which
combine to make up longer stretches of coherent discourse, selecting the appropriate
terms or types of speech as circumstances require. As the individual phenomenon language
is, therefore, it serves the purpose of expressing emotions, feelings, mental processes,
attitudes, etc. How did all this come about?

INGLÉS 13
Topic 1

Yule, in his Preface to “The Study of language”, reflects on the various theories on the
origins of language or, more appropriately human speech:
The divine source, which shows poor results as those children living without access to
human speech in their early years grow up with no language at all.

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The natural sounds source, which suggests that primitive words could have been
imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women might have heard around them;
or from natural cries of emotion, such as pain, anger, etc.; or the sounds of a person making
some physical effort, especially when involving several people and their actions had to be
coordinated. However, against this theory it could be argued that apes and other primates
have grunts and social calls, but they do not seem to have developed the capacity for speech.

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The oral-gesture source, which links physical gesture and orally produced sounds. The
argument is that a set of physical gestures developed as a means of communication, and
then a set of oral gestures.
Physiological adaptation. This theory concentrates on the physical aspects of humans
which are different from other creatures, like for instance, human teeth and lips, the human
mouth and larynx and, of course, the human brain.
David Crystal, in his Encyclopedia of Language, states that it is a fascinating albeit
fruitless question human beings have been asking for over 3,000 years. He mentions
five theories proposed by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), which would
correspond to the natural-sounds and the oral-gesture sources mentioned by Yule. Then,
he mainly focuses on the evidence obtained from palaeontology, which corresponds to the
physiological adaptation mentioned by Yule. However, his conclusion is that, so far at least,
we can only speculate about the origins of language.

1.2. Distinctive features of human language

Whatever its origin, language can also be viewed as a social phenomenon, for individuals
make use of language to interact with other human beings, expressing their feelings and
emotions, but also to communicate knowledge, skills and information. This connects with
one of the most important features of human languages: the development of writing. So,
what makes human language “human”?
Yule, Crystal and other language scholars mention the following unique properties:
Displacement: While it seems that animals can only communicate about the here and
now, human beings use language to communicate events which may be far removed in time
(not only now, but also past and future) and place (not only here, but also other locations).
Arbitrariness: In human language there is no “natural” connection between a linguistic
form (signifier, following Saussure) and its meaning (signified, in Saussure’s terms), as
shown by the fact that the different manifestations of language in different communities use
different terms to refer to the same object.
Productivity: Human languages are highly productive or creative, and they develop new
terms for new situations or for new objects. In fact the potential number of utterances in any
human language is infinite.
Cultural transmission: Human beings acquire the language in a culture with other
speakers, i.e. it is transmitted from one generation to the next, or from one group to an

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individual. Although it may be true to say that human beings have the innate ability to acquire
language, they are not born with the ability to produce utterances in a specific language. As
mentioned above, children who grow up without being exposed to a specific language are
not able to speak a sort of “instinctive” language. Thus, cultural transmission is essential in
the language acquisition process and accounts for the development of writing.

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Discreteness: The sounds used in a particular language are meaningfully distinct, that
is they are discrete. Thus. Spanish distinguishes between “rr” [ʀ] and “r” [ʁ], while English
does not. English, for its part distinguishes between “sh” [∫] and “ch” [t∫], which Spanish
does not. Both languages distinguish [p] from [b].
Duality: Language is organised at two levels simultaneously, that is, we can produce

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individual sounds, but these sounds can combine in different ways to produce different
meanings. Thus, the sounds [p], [І], [n], can combine to produce different meanings such
as “pin” or “nip”. This duality is one of the most economical features of human language
for just a few sounds can produce a very large number of possible sound combinations (i.e.,
words) which are distinct in meaning.

1.3. Language and language systems

And yet, although humans have the innate ability to use language, we do not all use a
“universal common language” but rather different communities use different languages, or
even different varieties of the same language, depending mainly on geographical location
and historical developments, but also on age, sex, social class, personality, etc. This is so
because just as the ability to produce language can be viewed as an individual phenomenon,
so the production of certain sounds will depend first on the specific language, then on the
specific group, and finally on the particular individual.
In order to bring some clarity to the many senses of the word “language” Saussure
(1857-1913) introduced a three-fold set of terms: Langage (language) as the faculty of
speech present in all normal human beings due to heredity – our faculty to talk to each
other. This faculty is composed of two aspects: Langue (the language system) and parole
(the act of speaking).
All language systems have certain levels of linguistic organisation, which are shared by
all forms of language, whether spoken, written, or signed, whether Spanish, English, Arabic,
Chinese, etc. Thus, the linguistic organisation of language can be viewed:
– At a very basic level of form and meaning.
– As being made up of pronunciation, grammar and meaning.
– As having three primary levels: substance or sounds, form or grammar and lexis,
and context or extra-linguistic situation, with the substance (phonetics) relating to
form through phonology, and form relating to the extra-linguistic situation through
context (semantics). (According to scholars such as Halliday).
– As having structure and a particular usage (i.e. realised through specific languages).
The structure of language takes into account the medium of transmission (i.e.
phonetics and phonology), the grammar (i.e. morphology and syntax) and the
meaning or semantics (i.e. lexicon and discourse). (Crystal).
– As having an internal structure (its form) and varied uses in human life (its function
or functions). (Yule, in his Preface to “The Study of language”).

INGLÉS 15
Topic 1

It could be concluded then that language — as the innate ability humans have to produce
and combine sounds in a variety of ways to communicate a great variety of meanings — is
realised through languages. Each of those languages is closely related to the culture of its
linguistic group whose members use it to interact with other members, making use primarily
of two channels: speech and writing. Language, therefore, is the main means whereby

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people communicate. Ironically, as David Crystal points out, its realisation into languages
is sometimes a source of failure in communication, either because the individuals mean
different things even if they use the same form of a language, or because they use different
forms — i.e., different languages — which are incomprehensible to the other.

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1.4. Language as the main means of communication
S. P. Corder, in his “Introducing Applied Linguistics” says that Communication can
be intentional or non-intentional, and linguistic or non-linguistic. Here we are concerned
with linguistic, intentional communication, that is, when we use language intentionally to
communicate something, either orally or, using a typically human feature, in writing.

1.4.1. The Communication Process

The 20th century saw an interest in the process of communication and many scholars
from different fields presented their models. All in all, they all come to say that in order to
communicate, the addresser or sender or originator of the message must have at least one
addressee or receiver or person to whom the message is addressed and a communicative
intention or message, which will be the topic or content or information in the message. In
order to carry through that communicative intention, the addresser makes use of a code,
which is the specific language or dialect used to convey the message, and a channel or
medium through which the message is conveyed (voice, paper, etc.). For the communicative
intention to be fulfilled, the addresser takes into account the setting or social or physical
context where the message is conveyed and chooses a message form realised through the
particular grammatical and lexical choices of the message.
The philosopher Paul Grice summarised this process by saying roughly that communicative
intentions occur when somebody says something to somebody else with the intention to
produce a particular response in the listener in reader and/or that the latter recognises the
speaker’s intention.

1.4.2. Decoding the code: interpreting the communicative

intention
To say something we make use of the sounds, words and sentences of a specific
language. However, this is not enough since:
a) Not all the sentences we use have the same relevance and so they may have
different “communicative intentions”.
b) The production of a series of “grammatically correct” sentences does not necessarily
convey meaning and so if there is an underlying “communicative intention” this is
not fulfilled.

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c) Some sentences are not “proper grammatical” sentences, yet they communicate
something and therefore have a “communicative intention” and
d) The same sentence said in a variety of contexts may mean many different things,
and so may convey different communicative intentions.

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For the addressee to understand or “decode” the code — i.e. the type of language
used — which transmits the message or “communicative intention” he must share with
the addresser what is known as “general knowledge of the world” and “knowledge of the
language”. The philosopher John Austin (1962) developed the speech act theory to try
and formulate how such knowledge is brought into play. His ideas were later developed by
another philosopher, John Searle (1969 & 1975).

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Speech act theory observes that there is a class of ritualistic utterances which carry no
information about the world outside language at all, because they refer only to themselves.
They are utterances in which saying the words and performing the action are the same thing,
like when swearing an oath, opening a building, sentencing a criminal, marrying somebody,
etc. These utterances are called declarations. But for declarations to be effective, they
must occur under certain external conditions: for example for the declaration “I declare you
husband and wife” to be effective, the person saying it must have the legal power to do so
and the people being married must also meet certain requirements for it to be valid.
In most circumstances of everyday life, the words spoken –or written– tend to have
different layers of intention and interpretation, and Speech act theory makes use of the
following terms to refer to them:
– The formal, literal meaning of the words is the locution.
– The act which is performed by saying the locution is the illocution (i.e., an order, a
promise, a challenge, some information, etc.).
– The overall aim of the discourse is the perlocution (i.e. to tell somebody what to
do, to assure somebody of something, to undermine somebody’s authority, to be
cheeky, to answer somebody’s questions, etc.).
Therefore, an utterance –or locution– has illocutionary and perlocutionary force. This is
perhaps more clearly seen in the following situation:
I go to the kitchen and find that, although it is their responsibility, my children have not
emptied the dish-washer. So I tell them: “Boys, the dish-washer has not been emptied yet”
(Locution). The illocutionary force in this comment is an order and the perlocutionary force
is to tell them that they must do it, it’s their duty.

1.4.3. Principles governing the linguistic communication process

Grice put forward in 1975 the “cooperative principle”, according to which, the
sender of the message is assumed to intend to be true, be brief, be relevant and be
clear. Under this assumption, combined with a shared general knowledge of the world, the
receiver of the message can reason from the semantic meaning of what is being said to
the pragmatic meaning and induce what the sender intends to communicate, even when
there is a “violation” or “flouting” –as Grice calls it– of this principle. In other words, this
“shared knowledge of the world” allows the receiver to understand hyperboles, metaphors,
irony, sarcasm, etc., while the “shared knowledge of the language” will allow the receiver to
understand puns, jargon, double speak, slang, etc.

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But this “shared” knowledge, like for example the understanding of the perception of
familiarity, rudeness, bluntness, etc. must include on the part of both the sender and the
receiver a shared knowledge of the rules governing the “politeness principle”, that is, the
use of formulaic expressions, or other expressions for a given contextual situation. The linguist
Robin Lakoff formulated in 1973 the maxims governing the “politeness principle” as: don’t

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impose, give options and make the receiver feel good. These maxims help understand the
communicative intention: In English it is very common to give orders and make requests and
pleas in the form of elaborate questions which give the option of refusal (one of the politeness
principles), or make apologies for imposing and perhaps even praise our hearer to make him
feel good, like for example when we say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but you know so much more
than I do about linguistics, could you explain what the meta-linguistic function is? Moreover,
this “politeness” principle sometimes clashes with the “cooperation” principle” –be truthful–

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and then we may be forced to tell “a white lie”, like for example when a friend asks if we like
her new shoes and we don’t, but we do not wish to hurt her feelings.
According to Brown and Levinson, the origin of the politeness principle is common to
all cultures; nevertheless, the practical use of that principle will vary according to cultures:
for example, in Spanish we do not usually say “please” when we ask a member of our family
for something, while in English, not to say it is considered rude.
Inferring the function of what is said by considering its form and context is essential for
successful communication. Nevertheless, the principles of cooperation and politeness are
not enough to provide the explanation for this inference. To do this, as has been mentioned,
we need knowledge of the physical and social world and make assumptions about the
knowledge the people we are interacting with have.

1.4.4. Two main channels in the linguistic communication

process
There are different levels of communication:
1. The addresser may address himself or herself, reflecting on their thoughts, feelings,
emotions, etc. This is intrapersonal communication and is usually realised in writing,
although it may also occur in speech or –more typically as a mental process.
2. The addresser may address another person, the addressee, who usually exchange
roles in turns, i.e., the addresser becomes the addressee and vice-versa in the
communication exchange. This is interpersonal communication and it usually occurs
in speech although with modern technologies it may also occur in writing: chatting
on the internet, exchanging e-mails, text messages, etc.
3. The addresser may address a small or a large group, and this is known as “group
communication”. It may occur in speech –in the form of lectures, speeches, stories,
etc., or in writing, in different forms, like essays, novels, reports, etc.
4. The addresser may address members of the business, scientific, etc. world, or the
administration. This is known as organisational communication and is often realised
in writing, although it may also be spoken.
5. The addresser may make use of special media directed to a large audience.
This is known as public or mass communication and is realised either in writing
(newspapers, web pages, etc.) or spoken (radio, television, video, etc.).

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6. The addresser may address an audience made up of participants from different

cultures. This is known as international communication and although it may
occur either in speech or in writing, the main common feature is that the code or
language used will not be all the participants’ mother tongue but all of them must
be competent users.

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As pointed out above, human beings make use of two basic channels in the
communication process: speech –or voice– and writing –or paper, screen, etc. The choice
of one channel typically marks the type of code –or language variety– used.
– Speech is mainly used for conversation purposes, in which at least two
participants interact. It can also be used as a “monologue” to advertise a

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product, to inform (lectures, announcements, etc.) and the communicative intention
will mark the type of language chosen. The term “conversation” is widely used to
refer to “informal talk” and conversation analysis tries to analyse how conversation
proceeds. One of the basic observations is that conversation involves turn-
taking and that, in most cases, the people taking part in it somehow “signal”
to each other that one turn has come to an end and another should begin. Only
when there is a wish to express annoyance, urgency or a desire to correct do the
participants in a conversation overlap turns. But these turn-taking mechanisms
vary between cultures and between languages. Efficient turn-taking also involves
non-linguistic factors, like eye contact –or lack of it– Intonation and volume are
also important as is the relative status of the speakers or the role which one of
them is playing. Other factors which are also important in conversation are:
Reciprocity, word order and schemata. There are two fundamental types of oral
communication: reciprocal, when there is at least a potential for interaction, when
the sender can adjust his message depending on its reception by the receiver who
can also influence its development and non-reciprocal when there is no possibility
for interaction. (Conversation between 2 people~the news read by a TV presenter).
The order in which an utterance is presented is also important. Typically in English
the order is given-> New->given->New or Topic->comment->topic->comment,
although sometimes there may be some variation to have some special effect on
the receiver. The term schemata was taken from the world of Artificial Intelligence
and it refers to all the information assumed by the sender and the receiver which
is not in the text, i.e., they make use of their shared knowledge of the world and
shared knowledge of the language to fulfil the communicative intention.
– Writing is the other channel employed, and it also determines the type of
language used in the communicative intention. As with speech, writing can
reflect “spoken exchanges” but it usually involves producing longer stretches
of language for the interpretation of which the decoder –or addressee or
reader– must master certain fixed rules not only in terms of knowledge of
form and interpretation of meaning but also on cohesive devices and other
pragmatic elements.
– All in all, it can be concluded that for the communication process to be successful,
the code or language used must include both formal links within the language,
which help to connect sentences so that they actually achieve the communicative
intention pursued by the speaker or writer, and contextual links outside the language,
which contribute to either add extra meaning to those sentences or give meaning to
utterances so that the listener or reader perceives the full communicative intention.
Regarding the formal links used to give cohesion and so make a communicative
intention coherent, perhaps the most typical and relevant is verb forms, since the

INGLÉS 19
Topic 1

form of the verb in one sentence usually limits the choice of the verb form in the next.
Another important link is parallelism, which occurs when the form or the meaning of
a sentence or clause, is repeated: it may be a grammatical structure, or a grammatical
pattern, or a sound, or even the same semantic concept said in different ways. Besides,
we can also make use of referring expressions (i.e., words which refer to another

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previously mentioned, of repetition of words or lexical chains, of substitution (when we
use auxiliaries to refer to an action), of ellipsis (i.e. when we omit something because
it is obvious) and of conjunctions (i.e. when we link the sentences to show the formal
relation between sentences: adding, giving examples, explanations, contrast, etc.).
Moreover, as mentioned above, a same sentence may have more than one meaning,
and therefore fulfil different communicative intentions depending on the situation. To
see if a communicative intention is properly fulfilled, or which communicative intention

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is meant by a specific utterance, we need to look behind the literal, formal meaning
of what is said or written, and first take into account what the sender of a message
intends to achieve, that is, what function or functions the sender intends in a specific
communicative act. Then, we must consider how the receiver interprets those intentions
and finally we must take into account that the interpretation of a communicative
intention is not the same for all languages and cultures.
– To sum it up, for a communicative intention to be fulfilled we employ language
rules of the type studied by grammarians and covered in most text books, which
operate between the sentences as well as within the sentence. But we also
employ knowledge of the world, of the speaker, of the social convention, of
what is going on around us, to make sense of what we hear or read.

2. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: definition and

features. How the concept evolved
“Competence” is one of the most controversial terms in the field of general and
applied linguistics. Its introduction to linguistic discourse has been generally associated
with Chomsky who in his very influential book “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” (1965)
drew what has been today viewed as a classic distinction between competence (the
monolingual speaker-listener’s knowledge of language, based on what Saussure called
langue) and performance (the actual use of language in real situations, based
on what Saussure called parole). Chomsky’s view of what was termed as linguistic
competence, though, was not intended for pedagogy but rather it was viewed to serve as
part of developing a theory of the linguistic system itself. This was idealised as the abstract
language knowledge of the monolingual adult native speaker, while performance would
refer to how that monolingual adult native speaker happens to use and experience language.
Soon after Chomsky proposed and defined the concepts of competence and performance,
advocates for a communicative view in applied linguistics (e.g. Savignon, 1972) expressed their
strong disapproval at the idea of using the concept of idealized, purely linguistic competence
as a theoretical ground of the methodology for learning, teaching and testing languages.
They found the alternative to Chomsky’s concept of competence in Hymes’ communicative
competence, which they believed to be a broader and more realistic notion of competence.
Hymes (1972) defined communicative competence not only as an inherent grammatical
competence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence in a variety of
communicative situations, thus bringing the sociolinguistic perspective into Chomsky’s

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linguistic view of competence. He stated that, in order to speak a language correctly, one does
not only need to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used.
He proposed what is known as the SPEAKING MODEL:
S – Setting and Scene: the setting refers to the time and place while the scene describes
he environment of the situation.

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P – Participants: the people involved in the speech, including the speaker and the audience.
E – Ends: the purpose and goals of the speech together with any outcomes of the speech act.
A – Act Sequence: The order of events that take place during the speech.
K – Key: The tone or manner of the speech.

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I – Instrumentalities: the form and style of the speech being given.
N – Norms: defines what is socially acceptable at the event.
G – Genre: the type of speech that is being given.
Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) understood communicative competence
as a synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed for communication.
In their concept of communicative competence, knowledge refers to the (conscious or
unconscious) knowledge of an individual about language and about other aspects of
language use. According to them, there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of
underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a social context
in order to fulfil communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine utterances
and communicative functions with respect to discourse principles. In addition, their
concept of skill refers to how an individual can use the knowledge in actual communication.
According to Canale (1983), skill requires a further distinction between underlying capacity and
its manifestation in real communication, that is to say, in performance.
To sum up, the theoretical framework proposed by Canale and Swain in 1980 and
1981 had at first three main components, i.e. fields of knowledge and skills: grammatical,
sociolinguistic and strategic competence. In a later version of this model, Canale (1983,
1984) transferred some elements from sociolinguistic competence into the fourth
component which he named discourse competence.
Unlike Hymes, or Canale and Swain, Savignon (1972, 1983) put a much greater emphasis
on the aspect of ability in her concept of communicative competence. Namely, she described
communicative competence as “the ability to function in a truly communicative
setting – that is, in a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competence must adapt
itself to the total informational input, both linguistic and paralinguistic, of one or
more interlocutors”.
Recent theoretical and empirical research on communicative competence is
largely based on the model of Canale and Swain and, to a much greater extent,
on the description of components of communicative language competence in the
Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).
In the CEFR (2001), communicative competence is conceived in terms of
knowledge (the knowledge speakers have) and skills (what speakers can do with
that knowledge). It includes three basic components:
– language competence,
– sociolinguistic competence, and

INGLÉS 21
Topic 1

– pragmatic competence, which involves two subcomponents:

i. discourse competence, and
ii. functional competence.
An integral part of both pragmatic competences is the so-called planning competence

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which refers to the sequencing of messages in accordance with interactional and
transactional schemata. Strategic competence is mentioned in the part the CEF
dedicated to a discussion of communicative language use. This competence is conceived
as strategy use in the broadest sense. Thus, the stress is put not only on the use of
communication strategies which can help to overcome the lack in a particular area
of language knowledge but on the use of all types of communication strategies.

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3. Linguistic competence: definition and features.
How the concept evolved
As was pointed out above, it was Chomsky who coined the term “linguistic competence”
to refer to the knowledge a native speaker has of the language. What for Canale and Swain
(1980, 1981) was grammatical competence was mainly defined in terms of Chomsky’s
linguistic competence, which is why some theoreticians like Savignon, whose theoretical
and/or empirical work on communicative competence was largely based on the model
of Canale and Swain, use the term “linguistic competence” for the latter “grammatical
competence”. According to Canale and Swain, grammatical competence is —
together with sociolinguistic, strategic and discourse competence — a subcomponent of
communicative competence which is concerned with mastery of the linguistic code
(verbal or non-verbal) which includes vocabulary knowledge as well as knowledge of
morphological, syntactic, semantic, phonetic and orthographic rules. This competence
enables the speaker to use knowledge and skills needed for understanding and expressing
the literal meaning of utterances.
For the CEFR, on the other hand, linguistic or language competence is — together
with pragmatic and socio-linguistic competence — a subcomponent of communicative
language competence defined as “the knowledge of, and ability to use the formal
resources from which well-formed, meaningful messages may be assembled and
formulated”. As can be seen, therefore, what for Canale and Swain was “grammatical
competence” for the linguists and language methodologists around the CEFR is “linguistic
competence”. Based on them, the subcomponents of language competence are:
a) Lexical: i.e., the ability to recognize and use words in a language in the way that
native speakers use them. They include lexical elements, like fixed expressions, and
single word forms, and grammatical elements, such as articles, quantifiers, etc.
b) Grammatical: i.e., the ability to use the grammatical resources of a language:
morphology and syntax.
c) Semantic: i.e., the ability to see how meaning is organised, in terms of lexical
semantics: how a word relates to the general context and how it interrelates with
other words; grammatical semantics: the meaning of grammatical elements,
categories, structures , etc. and pragmatic semantics: the logical relations such
as entailment, presupposition, implicature, etc.
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 Language and communication

d) Phonological: i.e., the ability to perceive and produce the sounds, phonetic
features, intonation, stress, phonetic reduction, etc. of a language.
e) Orthographic: i.e., the ability to perceive and produce the symbols of which written
texts are composed: the form of the letters, the spelling of words, punctuation
marks, logographic signs in common use, typographical conventions, etc.

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f) Orthoepic: i.e., the ability to produce a correct pronunciation from the written form,
to consult a dictionary and to know the conventions used to represent sounds, etc.

4. DISCIPLINES DEALING WITH COMMUNICATION PROCESSES

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We have already seen how the study of language has aroused the interest of many
different scholars.
Corder in his “Introducing Applied Linguistics” stated that “Language is a very complex
thing, and it cannot yet be fully accounted for by anyone within one wholly consistent and
comprehensive theory”. He mentions various ways to approach language: as a phenomenon
of the individual person seen as part of human psychology, related to human behaviour
which has as its main function that of communication; as a social phenomenon, since the
individual person needs at least another individual or a group to communicate, hence it
can be seen as part of sociology; and as a “linguistic phenomenon”, that is, approaching
language as a system, studying its structure, the connection of meaning and sounds, i.e.,
syntax and morphology, phonology and phonetics, lexis and semantics or, to sum it up:
grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.
Linguistics, therefore, is the scientific study of natural human language and includes
a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language
structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar
covers morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that
determine how words combine into phases and sentences) and phonology (the study of
sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics
concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and
how they are produced and perceived.
Other sub-disciplines of linguistics, mainly related to language as individual and social
phenomena include: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language;
historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at
the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which
explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics,
which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition and
language learning, which considers how children acquire their first language and how
children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; etc.
Human communication is a relatively young field of study, composed of a very broad array
of disciplines, ranging from the already mentioned Linguistics, Psychology, Anthropology and
Sociology, through Rhetoric and Journalism to Semiotics, among others. Communication
has indeed existed since the beginning of human history, but it was not until the 20th
century that people began to study the process. As communication technologies developed,
so did the serious study of communication. When World War I ended, the interest in studying
communication intensified. The social-science study was fully recognized as a legitimate
discipline after World War II.

INGLÉS 23
Topic 1

Communication Studies focus on communication as central to the human experience,

which involves understanding how people behave in creating, exchanging, and interpreting
messages. Since it is concerned with the making of meaning and the exchange of
understanding, one model of communication considers it from the perspective of transmitting
information from one person to another. In fact, many scholars of communication take this

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as the starting point for their studies, and use American Communication Theorist Lasswell’s
maxim, “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect,” as a means of defining
the field of communication theory. The primacy of communication in many areas of life is
responsible for the ubiquity of communication studies, as well as for the resulting confusion
about what does and does not constitute communication. Ongoing debates rage over whether
communication studies can best be understood as a discipline, a field, or simply a topic.

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Also in recent years, research into the new technologies and particularly the insights
derived from Computer Languages have greatly contributed to a better understanding of
human communication processes.

CONCLUSION
To sum up, language, viewed as an exclusively human capacity, has unique properties
and is mainly used for different communication purposes. For communication to succeed,
certain requirements have to be met and the channel used, together with the context
in which the communication situation takes place set most of those requirements. The
various disciplines which have taken an interest or whose main focus is language and/
or communication processes allow teachers to get a better insight into the teaching and
learning process of a foreign language.
Traditionally, teachers have taught students the sounds (pronunciation), words (lexis) and
then sentences (grammar) of a language. This is essential to establish rules and constraints
concerning what is and is not allowed in a language but if we want our students to communicate
successfully there is more to it than being able to produce correct sentences since:
a) Not all of them have the same relevance,
b) The production of a series of “grammatically correct” sentences does not necessarily
convey meaning,
c) Some sentences are not proper grammatical sentences, yet they communicate
something and
d) The same sentence said in a variety of contexts may mean many different things.
Hence, to develop communicative competence, teachers must teach beyond the sentence,
that is, what is known as “discourse”. One of the essential elements of discourse is the knowledge
of the world the participants in the communication act have (i.e., the context or knowledge of
where the events take place, of the speaker, the social conventions, etc.).
The other important element to take into account is that not all languages interpret a
communicative intention in the same way. That is why understanding how interpretation
proceeds in the culture of the language we are teaching is essential if we want to help our
students to make their words and sentences function in the way they intend. Consequently,
to teach utterances we need both semantic and pragmatic meaning since the needs of the
language learner are to be able to produce and understand coherent discourse, not just
isolated sentences.

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 Language and communication

Some functional/notional approaches like the one adopted in the Council of Europe
publications Waystage 1990, Threshold Level 1990 and Vantage Level offer an alternative
to the traditional teaching approach. Instead of starting from language forms and their
meanings, they start from a systematic classification of communicative functions and of
notions, divided into general and specific, and secondarily deal with forms, lexical and

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grammatical, as their exponents. The approaches are complementary ways of dealing
with the ‘double articulation’ of language. Languages are based on an organisation of
form and an organisation of meaning. The two kinds of organisation cut across each other
in a largely arbitrary fashion. A description based on the organisation of the forms of
expression atomises meaning, and that based on the organisation of meaning atomises
form. Which is to be preferred by the user will depend on the purpose for which the
description is produced. What is clear is that a language learner has to acquire both forms

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and meanings.

INGLÉS 25
Topic 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COUNCIL OF EUROPE: A Common European Framework of Reference for Languages:

Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: CUP. 2001.

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CORDER, S. PIT: Introducing applied linguistics. Penguin UK 1993.
COOK, GUY: Discourse. Oxford University Press. 2009.
CHOMSKY, NOAM: Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge MIT Press. 1965.
CRYSTAL, DAVID: The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language. CUP. 2007.

© Derechos de edición reservados a favor de EDITORIAL MAD, S.L. Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial sin permiso escrito del editor.
HYMES, DELL: Foundations of sociolinguistics: An ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia. U.
of Pennsylvania. 1974.
YULE, GEORGE: The Study of language. Cambridge University Press.
www.en.wikipedia.org

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