Within the current approach of an instantiation of the 'perspective' view of pragmatics, this paper, focusing on social role terms in Japanese, attempts to renegotiate the boundary between competence and performance in a way that the reference to (social) context of use per se doesn't automatically demarcate the boundary. The two traditional notions are replaced with the grammatical and communicative processor, corresponding respectively with Green's (1982) 'knowledge of language' and 'knowledge about language'. This distinction is particularly interesting in terms of an inclusive grammar theory, able to encompass any linguistically relevant information under a single structural representation.