Lacunarity and neology: diachronic aspect (based on the material of Russian writers’ epistolary texts of the 19th century)

Purpose. The author considers the problem of establishing a correlation between lacunarity and neologization of the language system in the diachronic aspect using methods of semantic, contrastive, contextual, corpus and quantitative analysis. The material for the study is Russian writers’ epistolary texts of the second half of the 19th century. The author specifies the meaning of the term lacuna in relation to diachrony: a lacuna is an empty cell in the lexical system of a language, revealed retrospectively by detecting means that compensate for it.