2.3. Vocabulary

Of course competent speakers of the language also know the lexis (or vocabulary) of a language – although that knowledge will vary depending, for example, on their education and occupation. They know what words mean and they also know the subtleties of some of those meanings. Competent speakers of English know what ‘a heart’ is but they do not get confused by sentences like ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve’ (He shows his feelings quite openly).

Competent speakers of a language also know the connotations of a word: e.g., would you tell your best friend that they were ‘thin’, ‘slim’ ‘skinny’ or ‘emaciated’? They also know how to change words – how to make ‘possible’ ‘impossible’, how to make ‘interesting’ ‘uninteresting’ and so on.

Competent speakers of a language follow what is happening to their language and how words change their meaning – and sometimes cross grammatical borders. For example, the word ‘awesome’ used to mean something that filled people with the mixture of respect and fear (Wizard of Oz the Awesome). Now it means simply ‘good’ or ‘great’, especially in American English (What an awesome blouse you are wearing! I wish it were mine). Some nouns are now used frequently as verbs, e.g., ‘to input’ or ‘to access data’. Some verbs acquire additional modal meaning. Thus, the verb ‘manage’ in modern English means not only ‘manipulate’, ‘handle’ but also ‘can’, ‘have the chance of’. E.g., ‘At last we managed to find him’ or ‘He can manage by himself’. Native speakers may be unaware of a word’s etymology but he certainly knows that the adjective ‘posh’ means ‘great’, ‘splendid’: ‘They opened a new posh bar in our street yesterday’. (Posh = port out, star(board) home).

Competent language users, in other words, know what words mean both literally and metaphorically. They know how words operate grammatically and they are sensitive to changes in word value. Without this lexical knowledge they would not be able to use the grammar to generate sentences with meaning.

2.4. Discourse

Even armed with language competence and lexical knowledge, however, language users may not be able to operate efficiently unless they appreciate how language is used. Grammatical competence is not enough: native speakers also have a subconscious knowledge of language use and of language as discourse.

Discourse is a relatively completed fragment of speech of any length expressing an idea or a thought of the speaker or writer. Discourse may vary from a single syntagm up to a phrase or a sentence, a super-phrasal unit or even a text. It comprises all characteristics of stress, intonation, lexical-grammatical organisation and stylistic colouring.

2.4.1. Appropriateness

Although the type of rules explained by Chomsky may account for a native speaker’s knowledge of grammar it may not be sufficient enough to explain everything a native speaker knows about his own language. One researcher in particular thought that Chomsky had missed out some very important information. Dell Hymes wrote, ‘There are rules of use without which the rules of syntax are meaningless’. In other words, the competence that Chomsky talked about (a knowledge of grammar rules) was no good to a native speaker if he didn’t know how to use the language those rules produced. It is not much help to know that ‘Would you like to’ takes infinitive unless we know that ‘Would you like to come to the cinema?’ is performing an inviting function.

Hymes, then, said that competence by itself was not enough to explain a native speaker’s knowledge, and he replaced it with his own concept of communicative competence. Communicative competence of a native speaker, realised in a communicative situation, or communicative context, is referred to as appropriateness.