The concept of 'field' and 'gap'

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics grade: 23 University of Erfurt (Philosophische Fakultt) course: Contrastive Linguistics English - German language: English abstract: The starting point of my research paper on field theory and gaps is the question: what are the different interpretations of ''field'' in our language nowadays. I started with dictionaries and went on with encyclopedias. According to the German dictionary Duden (Duden (2000: 370)) a field may be e.g. an electric field. This shows that this word may be lexical ambiguous. There can also be found some word combinations with ''field'' e.g. cross-country ''ins Feld (in den Krieg) ziehen'' or field crop. This example shows that there is no one-to-one correspondence in English for ''ins Feld ziehen''. A non-native speaker has to paraphrase this expression e.g. ''go to war''. However these notions are rather primary. In order to find a more precise kind of definition I searched the Wikipedia (http: //wikipedia.org/wiki/Feld (access: 2005-08-02 12:14 MEZ)) and found a very detailed description of the term ''field'': it can represent an acre (differentiated land area to grow agricultural crop) in sports the field to play on or a certain group of pursuers in military history the theater of war in general a specific field in physics a certain position in computer science a data structure in cutting the term for a single picture and in a specific area of heraldry the term for the parts of a crest. By looking up ''field'' in the online dictionary ''Wiktionary'' (http: //de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Feld (access: 2005-08-02 20:22 MEZ)) I discovered nearly the same definition as in the Wikipedia but there were two pieces of extra information about ''field'': it may be a defined as an area on a sheet of paper a board to play on or a screen but it can as well depict the world outside of a laboratory.