Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the information structure of gapping, a linguistic level which has been much less studied than syntax or semantics. Romanian is a good test case for such a study, since it displays a specific contrastive conjunction iar, which occurs frequently with gapping and which severely restricts the information structure ordering. We explain its high frequency with ellipsis by the fact that it shares several crucial constraints with gapping. Our data show that the contrastive pairs with iar do not have the same contribution: one pair contains contrastive topics, and the other foci. However, the order of the correlates in the source clause does not necessarily match the order of the remnants in the gapped clause. We use a QUD model, based on question-answer congruence, which is very useful for a careful investigation of the discourse and information structure of ellipsis.

Keywords

• gapping
• discourse
• contrast
• focus
• contrastive topic