John Benjamins Publishing Company
An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis
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Abstract
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.
Abstract
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.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The acquisition of verbal passives by Portuguese-speaking children 9
- Plus in the French negative system 29
- An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis 49
- On focal and wh -projections, indirect wh -questions, and quantificational chains 73
- Is there a dative alternation in Romanian? 91
- The interpretation of null subjects in Romanian 111
- Verum focus and Romanian polar questions 135
- The downward grammaticalisation of irrealis subordinators in Romanian, Salentino and southern Calabrese 157
- Differential object marking 171
- The effects of language ecology on syntactic structure 193
- The syntactic distribution of raddoppiamento fonosinttatico in Cosentino 205
- The causative-inchoative alternation (as we know it) might fall short 239
- On wh -extraction in de + que constructions in Spanish 263
- On another apparent violation of the subject-island constraint in French 277
- Moving towards an event 297
- Cyclicity without containment in Romanian perfects 311
- Dative clitics in Romanian ditransitives 335
- Syntactic vs pragmatic passive 357
- Index 373
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- The acquisition of verbal passives by Portuguese-speaking children 9
- Plus in the French negative system 29
- An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis 49
- On focal and wh -projections, indirect wh -questions, and quantificational chains 73
- Is there a dative alternation in Romanian? 91
- The interpretation of null subjects in Romanian 111
- Verum focus and Romanian polar questions 135
- The downward grammaticalisation of irrealis subordinators in Romanian, Salentino and southern Calabrese 157
- Differential object marking 171
- The effects of language ecology on syntactic structure 193
- The syntactic distribution of raddoppiamento fonosinttatico in Cosentino 205
- The causative-inchoative alternation (as we know it) might fall short 239
- On wh -extraction in de + que constructions in Spanish 263
- On another apparent violation of the subject-island constraint in French 277
- Moving towards an event 297
- Cyclicity without containment in Romanian perfects 311
- Dative clitics in Romanian ditransitives 335
- Syntactic vs pragmatic passive 357
- Index 373
