One approach to exploring context in technical communication is through the speech community. Composed of people who share the means and the need to communicate with each other, the speech community is essentially a social entity, its boundaries determined by feelings of commonality among the community's members. In considering the communication that occurs in a speech community, this article asks two general questions. First, what is the relationship among language, culture, and thought? Second, what knowledge is needed for effective communication? Answering the first question requires an exploration of the Whorfian hypothesis as it may apply to technical communication, while answering the second requires an expansion of Chomsky's grammatical competence to include language function and use and a broadening of Flower and Hayes's investigations of cognitive structures beyond the isolated experimental situation into the community.
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