Vocabulary, Lexis and Semantics
What this domain tests
This domain covers how words are formed, how meanings relate to one another, how words combine, and how vocabulary is selected, taught and remembered. Questions may ask you to identify a word-formation process, distinguish sense relations, or explain why a collocation sounds wrong.
Core rules and concepts
- Word formation: affixation (un-help-ful), compounding (bookshop), conversion (to email), blending (smog), clipping (gym), acronymy (NASA), back-formation (to edit from editor).
- Sense relations: synonymy (rarely total - begin/start differ in register and collocation), antonymy (gradable hot/cold, complementary alive/dead, relational buy/sell), hyponymy (rose is a hyponym of flower), meronymy (petal is a meronym of flower).
- Polysemy is one word with related senses (head of a person, head of a department); homonymy is distinct words that happen to share a form (bank of a river, financial bank).
- Denotation is the core referential meaning; connotation is the evaluative colouring - thrifty and stingy denote similar behaviour but appraise it differently.
- Collocation is habitual co-occurrence: make a decision, do the washing. Collocational error is a strong marker of non-nativeness even when grammar is correct.
- Semantic features and prototypes explain graded membership: a penguin is a less typical bird than a robin.
- Idioms and phrasal verbs are non-compositional and often inseparable (look after a child, not look a child after).
- Vocabulary knowledge has breadth (how many words) and depth (form, meaning, use); frequency lists and CEFR wordlists guide selection, while spaced retrieval builds retention.
Worked example
'The old man's head was full of figures.'
Is head polysemous or homonymous here? The sense 'mind, seat of thought' shares a core bodily-anchor meaning with the literal sense and supports figurative extension, so it is polysemy. Reasoning: consult shared etymology and the systematic metaphor MIND IS A CONTAINER, then check collocation ('full of figures' only fits the mental sense).
Traps
- Treating synonyms as freely interchangeable in collocation and register.
- Confusing antonym types, especially complementary versus gradable pairs.
- Mislabelling homonymy as polysemy without checking etymology and sense relatedness.
- Teaching word lists without grammatical information such as countability or transitivity.