ABSTRACT
Donaldson suggests two specific reasons for the communicational breakdown. One reason was that the child did not know and the teacher forgot to consider that he probably did not know 'that school is not a place where one normally gets presents'. The second reason was that the child probably did not know the 'idiomatic, adult meaning of the words for the present. The plain fact is that no rule-based model of any kind so far proposed can come to terms with the real-life flexibility of communication situations and communicational processes. Searle has made an important point of the difference between the notion of a rule as it applies to linguistic behaviour and the notion of a rule as it applies to certain other kinds of behaviour. Hymes had drawn the distinction as follows: Linguistic theory treats of communicative competence in terms of the child's acquisition of the ability to produce, understand, and discriminate the grammatical sentences of a language.
