An English for Special Purposes (ESP) course being developed aims to give the students a series of techniques to help them handle vocabulary in a text, and teach them strategies for identifying meaning in context. Traditional strategies, such as the study of morphology, use of grammatical information, and exercises in dictionary usage, are helpful, but they do not teach the student to be satisfied with a vague notion of meaning. Another strategy, using context clues, has long been advocated, but techniques for doing this have not been worked out. It students are to use context, they need to know the principles of semantic restraint, as operated by context. It seems possible to use insights into meaning from structural semantics in order to elucidate some of these principles. In addition to these insights, the use of nonsense words has been incorporated into vocabulary exercises because the only meaning a nonsense word can have comes from context. Examples are provided of exercises using the following relations: (1) hyponymy, the relation between terms, one of which is included in the other; (2) opposites, including the relations of incompatibility, antonymy, complementarity and converse; (3) synonymy; and (4) other sorts of meaning relations such as rhetorical structure, definitions, and notional and pragmatic relations. (AMH)