Reading comprehension is not merely the reception of encoded information in a text, but also a process in which the reader mobilizes knowledge, selects relevant information, and performs reasoning to form, verify, and adjust their understanding. This article clarifies reading comprehension competence from a pragmatic perspective, focusing on the dimension of meaning interpretation. Based on the analysis, synthesis, and comparison of reading comprehension studies with certain tenets of pragmatics, the article proposes three interacting functional dimensions: mobilizing and selecting information to support interpretation; performing pragmatic inference; and forming and justifying interpretations. Among these, verification and adjustment serve as the overarching control mechanism. Analysis of Vietnamese literary and journalistic corpora shows that these dimensions can be identified from expressions and utterances to the entire text. The findings of this paper offer implications for application in research, instruction, and assessment of reading comprehension competence.