Against syntactic reconstruction in Romanian gapping

Abstract

It has often been argued that non-constituent coordination (such as Argument Cluster Coordination, Right Node Raising and gapping) involves ellipsis. Focusing in this paper on gapping constructions, we provide empirical evidence drawn from Romanian against strict parallelism and syntactic reconstruction (achieved by a deletion process) and argue in favor of a surface and semantically-oriented approach. We propose a simpler syntactic analysis in terms of fragment, conceived as a fully grammatical structure that is a proper part of the grammar.

Keywords

• ellipsis
• reconstruction
• fragment
• gapping