Lokalitätslücken

Lokalitätslücken, translated as locality gaps, is a term used in German-language academic writing to describe missing or unexpressed positions related to location, either spatially, temporally, or structurally. The concept is employed across disciplines to indicate gaps in data, descriptions, or theoretical models where something is known to have a locational aspect but the exact position is not represented.

In linguistics and related fields, Lokalitätslücken are most often discussed in connection with syntactic movement and locality constraints. When an element such as a wh-word is moved to a higher position in the sentence, its original position may be left as an unpronounced or abstract place holder, sometimes described as a gap or trace. This use emphasizes how linguistic structure encodes information about locality and the limits of permissible movement within a syntactic tree.

Beyond linguistics, the term appears in archaeology, geography, and the study of historical records to denote gaps in what is known about where artifacts were produced or used, where events occurred, or how spatial distributions are represented in datasets. Such gaps can arise from missing records, preservation bias, or sampling design, and they often require targeted fieldwork, data imputation, or georeferencing to address.

In philosophy of science and physics, Lokalitätslücken may be invoked to discuss issues of locality, causality, or the completeness of empirical descriptions, particularly when non-local explanations or incomplete localization of properties are considered.

See also: locality, gap, trace, spatial data, data imputation.