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In:Romance Perspectives on Construction Grammar
Edited by Hans C. Boas and Francisco Gonzálvez-García
[Constructional Approaches to Language 15] 2014
► pp. 227–265

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Chapter 7. A Romance perspective on gapping constructions

 | CNRS-University of Paris-7 Diderot, France
 | CNRS-University of Paris-7 Diderot, France
 | University of Rennes 2, France
Published online: 28 August 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.15.07abe
Focusing on two Romance languages, French and Romanian, we provide a detailed analysis of gapping and present several empirical arguments for preferring a construction-based approach of gapping (with semantic reconstruction of ellipsis) over alternative accounts that rely on movement or deletion. We then study parallelism constraints and show that syntactic parallelism is less strict than what is usually assumed, while discourse parallelism is clearly required. Syntax is not completely ignored though, as each remnant is required to match some subcategorization frame of the verbal predicate its correlate depends on. We show how those core properties can be accounted for within a construction-based framework relying on inheritance hierarchies of typed feature structures, such as HPSG in its more recent versions.
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