This chapter problematizes the relationship between linguistic competence and communicative competence, as proposed by Chomsky (1965) and disputed by Hymes (1966), respectively. The contention is that these two types of competence are not in competition but should be regarded as a symbiosis. Current research demonstrates that there is much value in analyzing how linguistic and communicative competence work together. Our emphasis in this chapter is on pragmatic universals and the way languages may express them differently, thereby creating difficulty for second language (L2) learners. Within the area of interpersonal rhetoric, speech acts and (scalar) implicature are examined with a view of highlighting the amalgamation of grammar and communication in learning to compute and produce them. In tackling definiteness and specificity in the L2, we discuss the ways adults learn to refer to objects known or unknown to speaker or hearer. Deixis, or calculating reference based on the here and now, is a relatively underresearched area of pragmatic competence. At the syntax-discourse interface, we examine the acquisition of information structure, or topic and focus marking. The chapter finishes with a call for extending the research enquiry to all context-dependent aspects of meaning encoding and decoding.