Lexical Gap

Lexical gaps are also known as lexical lacunae. The vocabulary of all the languages including
English and Tamil shows lexical gaps. For example, English noun horse as a hypernym, incorporates its denotation both stallion (male horse) and mare (female horse). However there is no such hypernym in the case of cows and bulls, which subsumes both cow and bull in denotation. The absence of such a hypernym is called a lexical gap.

Lyons (1977, pp. 301-305) addresses lexical gaps from a structuralist’s perspective. A structuralist defines lexical gaps as slots in a patterning. Wang (1989) defines lexical gaps as empty linguistic symbols and Fan (1989) defines them as empty spaces in a lexeme cluster. Rajendran (2001) defines lexical gap as a vacuum in the vocabulary structure of a language.
We always encounter the lexical gaps when we try to translate one language into another or develop a bilingual or multilingual dictionary or lexical data base like wordNet or thesaurus or ontology for the vocabulary of a language.
Lexical gap denotes an instance where a language expresses a concept as a lexical unit or
word while the other language expresses it with a free combination of words.
A competing term for 'lexical gaps' is ' lexical holes'. The two terms are alternatively used in the
literature available on the topic. However, ‘lexical gap’ as a term is widely used than 'lexical hole'. The
definition of lexical depends upon whether we talk about lexical gap within a language or across the
languages. As far as translation is concerned, the lexical gaps across language are crucial ones. Of course
the lexical gaps within the language too help us to understand the lexical gaps across the languages in
clear terms.
There is a unanimous agreement between linguists and translation specialists of what a lexical
gap means. Trask (1993:157) defines lexical gap as “the absence of a hypothetical word which would
seem to fit naturally into the pattern exhibited by existing words". The pioneer in field semantics, Lehrer
(1974:95) states that the term 'lexical gap' is multiply ambiguous as it has been applied to all sorts of
instances where a word, in one way or another, is missing. A lexical gap means the absence of
lexicalization of a certain concept. A concept is lexicalized when a language has a lexical item to express the concept. The lexical item could be a single word, a complex word, an idiom or a collocation. The
existence of a lexical gap will be noted only when a concept lack lexicalization and is expressed by a free
word combination or any other transformation (e.g. omission, translation by different parts of speech,
etc.). Thus the multiword expression X is not a lexical gap, because it is a fixed expression in a language,
while Y is a lexical gap, because it is a free-word combination

Sources:

⠀ Trask, R. L.1993 A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. London: Routledge.