Gapping through the Lens of Sentence Parsing
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2019
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Abstract
In this thesis, I first discuss how generative grammar and categorical grammar have attempted
to accommodate the phenomenon of gapping. I identify problems of over-generation
and self-consistencies in existing approaches within the two grammatical frameworks and conclude
that the acceptability of gapping structures cannot be explained by grammar alone.
Instead, I argue that unacceptable gapping structures generated by even the most basic generative
or categorical grammar framework are not ungrammatical, but rather unparsable. In
Chomsky's terms, it is a matter of performance, not competence. I support my argument by
identifying parsing difficulties in the data of interest and I also show that they are consistent
with sentence parsing theories, especially ellipsis parsing theories. Therefore, by introducing
parsing considerations, previously over-generated gapping examples are fully accounted for,
since their unacceptability is accommodated by sentence parsing constraints.