Need help with sweater patter - first time knitter

Hello. I’m new to knitting and would like to knit this sweater.

The yoke chart is confusing. See photo. What do the empty spaces mean?

Welcome to the forum!

Very pretty sweater pattern.
The empty spaces are just that, empty. There’s no stitch there. Sometimes these are represented by grey No Stitch boxes. You can ignore them and proceed from the initial purl stitch to k4, M1purl, k4 and then p1.


The empty area will eventually be filled in by the M1 stitches.