Gapping in English: Towards a Specifying Coordination Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the syntax of Gapping in English, which phonologically suppresses a main verb (and, occasionally, other neighboring elements). Noting that Gapping occurs in the coordinate clause, we suggest that it involves what de Vries (2009) calls specifying coordination that conjoins together syntactically parallel phrases. Specifically, we argue that specifying coordination obeys the economy requirement of sentence structure building, thus what constitutes syntactically parallel phrases in specifying coordination being the minimal propositional phrases vP"s. We then show that the central structural features of Gapping such as (i) structural parallelism; (ii) Gapping in the vP domain; (iii) survivors as clausemates follow from this conception of specifying coordination whereby the gapped clause is constructed, subsequently undergoing VP Ellipsis to derive Gapping as soon as survivors/remnants move out of the VP to be elided.