Abstract

One of the interests in the Gapping construction is the headache it causes for those trying to get constituency structure right. On the assumption that Gapping, like other processes of sentence grammar, respects constituency, it is very hard to deliver the right constituents in cases such as (1). (1) a. Some consider him honest and others consider him pleasant. b. The faculty brought scotch to the party and the students brought beer to the party. c. The girls occasionally ate peanuts and the boys occasionally ate breath mints. (Understand the material in strikeouts to be Gapped.) Everything else tells us that the Gapped strings in (1) should not form a constituent which excludes the material left behind. Yet, the fact that only when the verb Gaps may the other material too suggests just the opposite. That is, if we deny that the verb forms a constituent with the other material, and let Gapping apply to each of the elided constituents independently, we would have no way to express this dependency. If we let Gapping only elide constituents that house the verb, on the other hand, it follows.