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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2017: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 31, Bucharest
Edited by Alexandru Nicolae and Adina Dragomirescu
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 355] 2021
► pp. 49–72

An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis

The case of pro-drop in Romance gapping

| University of Bucharest
| University of Lille
The present study investigates parallelism constraints in Romance gapping with pro-drop. We provide empirical evidence from two acceptability judgment tasks in Romanian and Spanish, that syntactic parallelism in gapping is less strict than traditionally assumed. Parallelism constraints are stronger at the discourse and information structure levels than at the syntactic level. Our experimental findings show that gapping with pro-drop is as acceptable as without pro-drop, challenging the double foci analysis and supporting the topic-focus pattern for gapping constructions. At the semantic level, our data show that the contrast in gapping is not always established explicitly; more generally, they show that one cannot make a correlation between contrast and subject (null vs overt) expression in Romance.
Keywords: gapping, parallelism, pro-drop, constructional approach, Romance, Romanian, Spanish, acceptability judgments
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic parallelism in gapping
  • 3.Experimental studies on pro-drop and gapping
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • Results
    • Discussion
  • 4.A construction-based analysis of gapping
  • 5.Implications for the information structure and semantics of gapping
    • 5.1Implications for information structure
    • 5.2Implications for the semantic contrast
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.355.03bil
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