That is, communicative competence encompasses a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, but reconceives this knowledge as a functional, social understanding of how and when to use utterances appropriately.
[1] The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language, including work on speech acts.
[2] The term was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966,[3] reacting against the perceived inadequacy of Noam Chomsky's (1965) distinction between linguistic competence and performance.
[4] To address Chomsky's abstract notion of competence, Hymes undertook ethnographic exploration of communicative competence that included "communicative form and function in integral relation to each other".
[7] In a second model, sociocultural content is more precisely specified by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell in 1995.