2. English is already a colorful and vocabulary-rich language, yet it is still haunted by
lexical gaps.
A lexical gap, also called accidental gap or lacuna is a fully developed word
present in one language that is missing in another. The rules of word formation in
other languages permit the existence of such words.
You might have experienced a situation where you search for a specific word to
express what you feel but cannot find one. Maybe it’s because no such word exist in
your own language.
3. For example, teasing someone by tapping the other’s shoulder from behind has no
equivalent descriptive word in English. However, the Indonesian word for it is
”mencolek.” Often, you can only describe the feeling in English by using several
words.
4. Systematic gaps and lexical gaps
Systematic gaps and accidental gaps are not the same. The former are words that do not
exist in one language because of the parameters set by the morphological, phonological
and other rules set by a particular language.
In the rules for word formation in English, a word should have a combination of vowels and
consonants, thus something like /pfnk/ cannot be included in the English lexicon. But this
is a systematic gap and not a lexical gap.
The string such as /peɪ̯k/ follows the word formation rules of English, but it is not
considered an English word. In theory, this should exist as a word, yet it is not present in
the English language, which is an example of accidental or lexical gap.
5. • An accidental gap or a lexical gap is a word or a form of a word that would be
permitted by the grammatical rules of a language but nevertheless does not exist in
the language.
• Lexical gaps are well-formed but nonexisting words.
• There are always gaps in the lexicon-words not present but that could be added. For
example: slarm - krobe
6. Accidental gaps come in three major kinds:
1. Phonological
2. Morphological
3. semantic.
Types Of Lexical Gaps
7. 1. Phonological gaps
Phonological gaps have to do with the sounds that make up words.
A word that could technically be allowed in a phonological system of one language may not
present in that language.
One example in English is:
/spr/, which is a consonant cluster that is present in the beginning of words such as spray,
spree, spring or sprain.
The syllable rhyme /ɪk/ is seen in words such as lick, pick, bicker, flicker or sick.
But you cannot combine the two to form a word that would be pronounced as /sprick/.
Phonologically, this is a well-formed word, but it’s a non-existent word in English.
8.
9. 2. Morphological gaps
It is the absence of a word that could exist given the morphological rules of a language, including
its affixes.
In English grammar, you can form deverbal nouns (nouns derived from verbs) by the addition of
suffixes such as -(t)ion or -al to some verbs.
Examples in English:
• The verb ”recite” can give you ”recitation” and ”recital.”
• You can get the nouns ”proposition” and ”proposal” from the verb ”propose”.
• From the verb ”arrive” you can only produce ”arrival” but not ”arrivation.”
• It is also true for the verb ”refuse”, you can have ”refusal” but not ”refusion”
• For the verb ”derive”, you can have ”derivation” but not ”derival.”
10. It is possible to have several potential words if you simply follow the morphological rules of any
language but they would not be included in the lexicon of that particular language.
11. 3. Semantic gaps
A semantic gap happens when a specific word has a meaning distinction that can be seen but is
missing in the vocabulary.
One example in English:
To illustrate, some words to describe the family members show specific gender. So ”father,”
”uncle, ”son,” ”nephew” and ”grandfather” indicate male members of the family. The
corresponding words for the female family members are ”mother,” ”aunt,” ”daughter,” ”niece” and
”grandmother.” However, the term ”cousin” is gender-neutral. It is a term that can be used for a
female or male relative.
12. English Language Lexical Gaps
Here are some examples of popular lexical gaps in English. Generally, they are untranslatable
words. For translators, this means they have to add footnotes, among other strategies, to their
work when they are doing translations into English or vice-versa.
1. In the Czech language, they say ”vbyafnout” that in English means the act of jumping out in
order to scare a person.
2. When people gain extra weight from emotional binge eating, the Germans have a single word
for it – ”kummerspeck.”
3. A female who lost her husband becomes a widow, whereas if it is a male, he is called a
widower. But if a son or daughter loses a parent, he or she is called an orphan. There is no term
when parents lose their child.
13. 4. In English, there is no word available to describe the action of looking into the distance, but for
the Japanese, it is called ”boketto.”
5. You scratch you head in an effort to remember something. It is the long description of the
action in English. For Hawaiians however, they call it ”pana po’o.”
6. “To not look” has no single term available in the English language.
7. If you feel extremely angry or you shivering too much from the cold that your teeth chatter,
Persians call the feeling ”zhaghzhagh.”
14. 8. Some people make a kissing or squeaking sound by sucking air through their lips in
order to call the attention of a child or a pet. There is no word for it in English but the
Samoans called the action ”faamiti.”
9. What do you call a person who asks plenty of questions? There may not be a term for it
in English, but in Russian language such person is called ”pochemuchka.”
