Vocabulary and Lexical Range
Domain 4 - Vocabulary and Lexical Range - measures precision rather than volume. Knowing a rare word counts for little if it collocates wrongly or carries the wrong connotation. The exam rewards the choice a competent writer would actually make.
Collocation and connotation
- Verbs and their objects are learnt together: draw a distinction, pose a threat, reach a consensus, raise concerns, meet a deadline, bear the cost.
- Adverb–adjective pairs: highly unlikely, deeply concerned, strongly opposed, widely believed, bitterly disappointed.
- Connotation: thrifty, frugal and economical sit near stingy; childlike sits near childish; determined sits near stubborn; regime sits near administration. Denotation may match while evaluation does not.
- Register: commence/start, purchase/buy, sufficient/enough, prior to/before. The Latinate option suits formal prose and becomes pompous when overused.
Word formation
- Suffixes shift class and meaning: credible/credulous/credibility; economic/economical; historic/historical; sensible/sensitive; industrial/industrious; alternate/alternative.
- Negative prefixes are lexical, not rule-governed: un-, in-, im-, il-, ir-, dis-, non-, mis-. Learn them attached to the word, not as a system.
Paraphrase under exam conditions
- When the task says “in your own words”, change the structure as well as the lexis: “The council postponed the decision because of the protests” becomes “Protests led the council to defer its decision.”
- Keep technical terms that have no accurate synonym; paraphrase the framing, not the terminology.
Worked example
Source: “The government tried to make people less worried about the economy.”
Candidate: “The government sought to allay public anxiety about the economy.”
Reasoning: “sought to” is more formal than “tried to” and matches the register; “allay” collocates with anxiety, fear and concern; “public anxiety” is more precise than “people less worried”. A weaker alternative - “reduce the worries of the population” - is grammatical but collocationally clumsy and register-blind.
Traps
- False friends: French actuellement is not actually; éventuellement is not eventually; sensible is not sensible in French.
- Thesaurus swaps that break collocation (“make a decision” → “perform a decision”).
- Idioms in the wrong register, or idioms mixed with metaphors (“a landmark that paved the way”).
- Spelling of Latinate words: occurrence, consensus, accommodation, indispensable, bureaucracy.