Topic 13. Textual aspects of lexical competence

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Topic 13. Textual aspects 
of lexical competence

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Lexical competence is an aspect of both linguistic competence
and
communicative competence
. The ability to produce and
understand the words of a language.
the way we use, perceive and conceptualise objects is part of a kind of
knowledge that not only belongs to our
lexical competence
, but is precisely
what allows us to know the meanings of words and to use them correctly.

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The depressing feature of documents is the picture of 
smart but stupid military planners
, the equivalent of 
America's fundamentalists, happily playing the fool with 
the future of the planet.
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Here, two words, 
smart 
and 
stupid, 
frequently occurring in 
the language as antonyms, and therefore incompatible, are 
to be interpreted as compatible descriptions of the military 
experts. To do this we have to adjust our typical 
expectations of how the two words operate as a related 
pair. One reasonable interpretation would be that the 
experts are clever ('smart') but morally reckless ('stupid'); to 
interpret them as meaning 'intelligent but unintelligent' 
would clearly be a nonsense.
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