Noting that in different disciplines the study of communicative competence has focused to varying degrees on referential, social, and directive functions of communication, this paper reviews the three major traditions using the term. The first section of the paper reviews the sociolinguistic tradition, which views communicative competence as situational, interactional, functional, and developmental. The second section discusses the referential tradition, which is concerned with role-taking, comparison skills, and propositional meaning. The third section examines the speech communication tradition, focusing on two strands--social perspective taking and effectiveness of communicator style--and a third strand, restricted to communication education, that has attempted to delimit specific skills appropriate for testing competence within the school. The paper then uses arguments from speech act theory regarding the links between referential and social meaning to argue the need for an interactional definition of communication competence linking referential, social, and structuring aspects of continuing discourse. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of such an integration. An extensive bibliogrpahy is included. (FL)