Abstract
The analysis of gapping still leaves many questions open. At least three aspects remain controversial: whether it involves unpronounced structure, whether clausal or non-clausal constituents are conjoined, and whether all gapped sentences are must be analyzed uniformly. On the basis of French gapped constructions such as Marie n’est jamais allée à Rome ni Jean à Pékin ‘Mary never went to Rome nor John to Beijing’, the paper argues that gapping is not an homogeneous phenomenon. It first shows that in such gapped clauses involving ni, a strict Negative Polarity Item, a negation low inside the first TP can license the ‘negative coordinator’ ni, a fact that a TP-deletion analysis of gapping or a fragment coordination one can capture. Conversely, it shows that a vP-coordination analysis correctly predicts the properties of ni-gapped clauses. However, such an analysis cannot extend to gapped clauses conjoined by double ni : the second conjunct, this time, must be a full clause or a fragment.
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