This article considers the category of deprivation in Russian ritual lamentations which is based on the idea of privation, or lack / shortage of something. This idea is conceptually significant for the genre: it forms the lament’s motivic structure and is expressed by lexical-semantic means. The most direct and productive way to linguistically implement of the deprivation category is using word-formative caritives, or the words and word combinations using bez, which is a preposition and prefix meaning “without,” and expressing shortage or lack of something. In general, words and word combinations with bez have a high frequency in the laments, however, they occur to varying degrees in texts with different functional types of lamentations. The most bez -constructions are found in recruit lamentations, and, and the least are found in wedding laments. This article shows that these differences are not accidental and are explained from the standpoint of linguopragmatics. On the one hand, they are connected with the peculiarities of rites associated with lamentations. On the other hand, the specificity of lamentation texts are important, including the place of the lament (its verbal code) in the structure of the ritual, and the organisation of character system in a particular functional type of lamentation