Lexical Gaps: Their Filling and Impacts

In the linguistic system, vocabulary is of vital importance in grammatical structuring and meaning making thanks to its role both as a carrier of language and as a drive for language development. According to Saeed (2009, p. 63), the vocabulary of a particular language is not just a random list of lexemes. As a matter of fact, the vocabulary is organized in terms of lexical fields. A lexical field is a group of lexemes which belong to a particular activity or area of specialist knowledge, such as the terms in cooking or sailing; or the vocabulary used by doctors, coal miners or mountain climbers. However, some lexical fields lack integrity in that some lexemes which should and could occur are absent. Starting with a definition of what a lexical gap is, the current paper explores the possible methods for compensating lexical gaps and reveals the consequential impacts thus arising.