Can gapping be embedded? Experimental evidence from Spanish

Abstract

This paper discusses the No Embedding Constraint, considered to be a strong syntactic constraint on gapping and a diagnostic for this ellipsis type. As shown by two acceptability judgments tasks in Spanish, the assumptions related to the No Embedding Constraint are not borne out by our experimental results. Embedded gapping is acceptable in Spanish, and seems to be governed by a (more general) semantic constraint. Specifically, some predicates embed more easily than others, confirming, on the one hand, the asymmetry between non-factive and factive predicates, and, on the other hand, the dichotomy between semi-factive and true factive predicates. Embedded gapping and embedded coordinated clauses in general are thus sensitive to the semantic class of the embedding predicate. We argue that our data on embedded gapping in Spanish constitute a challenge for any Small Conjunct Gapping approach (in terms of subclausal/low coordination) and give support to a Large Conjunct Gapping approach (in terms of clausal/high coordination). In this paper, we adopt a constructional fragment-based analysis of gapping, which treats non-embedded and embedded gapping uniformly. More generally, this paper suggests that gapping is more similar to other ellipsis types than has been traditionally assumed.