Accidental gap

An accidental gap is a non-existing word which is expected to exist given the hypothesized morphological rules of a particular language.

Examples

In English it is possible to derive nouns from verbs by adding the suffixes -al and -(a)tion to the verbal stem. However, some such derivations do not exist, although there are no grammatical reasons for their nonexistence. Compare the following examples:

(i)

     recite	  recital      recitation
     propose	  proposal     proposition

(ii)

     arrive	  arrival     *arrivation
     refuse	  refusal     *refusation

(iii)

     derive	 *derival      derivation
     describe   *describal    description

Comments

In the literature, an accidental gap is usually thought of as a hole in a paradigm.

Link

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Allen, M.R. 1978. Morphological Investigations, PhD diss. Univ. of Connecticut.
• Bochner, H. 1988. The forms of Words: a Theory of Lexical Relationships, PhD diss. Harvard Univ. Cambridge.
• Halle, M. 1973. Prolegomena to a Theory of Word-Formation. Linguistic Inquiry 4, 451-464.
• Scalise, S. 1984. Generative Morphology. Foris, Dordrecht.
• Spencer, A. 1991. Morphological Theory. Blackwell, Oxford.