The article examines lacunarity as a linguistic, semantic, and linguocultural phenomenon manifested in asymmetries between languages at the lexical, grammatical, phraseological, and pragmatic levels. The study aims to clarify the theoretical status of lacunarity in modern linguistics and to show how lacunar relations operate in contrastive analysis, translation, lexicography, and intercultural communication. The research is based on descriptive, comparative, and interpretive methods and synthesizes findings from lexical semantics, translation studies, and multilingual lexical database research. The analysis demonstrates that lacunarity should not be reduced to the simple absence of a word in one language. Rather, it reflects deeper mismatches in conceptual segmentation, communicative priorities, cultural salience, and grammatical encoding. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between lexical gaps and referential gaps, to specification and generalization mismatches, and to the problem of equivalence in translation. The article argues that lacunarity is not a defect of language but a normal consequence of the selective way in which languages lexicalize experience. It is further shown that lacunarity has methodological value: it reveals culturally marked concepts, tests the limits of bilingual equivalence, and exposes the need for explanatory, contextual, and compensatory strategies in translation and lexicography. The conclusion states that lacunarity is one of the most productive analytical categories for understanding how linguistic systems differ while remaining mutually interpretable in discourse.

Lacunarity, lacuna, lexical gap, linguistic context

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