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Factivity and complementizer omission in English embedded gapping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2022

GABRIELA BÎLBÎIE ,
ISRAEL DE LA FUENTE  and
ANNE ABEILLÉ
GABRIELA BÎLBÎIE
Affiliation:
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Str. Edgar Quinet 5-7, 010017, Bucharest, Romania gabriela.bilbiie@lls.unibuc.ro
ISRAEL DE LA FUENTE
Affiliation:
STL – UMR 8163 CNRS, Université de Lille, Rue du Barreau, BP 60149, 59653, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France israel.de-la-fuente@univ-lille.fr
ANNE ABEILLÉ
Affiliation:
LLF – UMR 7110 CNRS, Université Paris Cité, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 5ème étage, 8 Rue Albert Einstein, 75013, Paris, France abeille@linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr
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Abstract

Taking as a starting point the variation in introspective judgments on embedded gapping in English in the literature, the main goal of this paper is to test the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ experimentally. Building on a first experimental study designed to measure the interaction between that-omission and factivity in English embedded complement clauses, we conducted two experiments testing the role of the complementizer in embedded gapping, paying special attention to the semantic nature of the matrix predicates (non-factives vs semi-factives vs true factives). Our results show, on the one hand, that the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ makes too strong claims that are not backed up by our experimental findings, and, on the other hand, that embedded gapping is affected by both the presence/absence of that and by the semantic class of the matrix predicate in English. In particular, embedded gapping seems to be more acceptable under non-factive verbs, especially in the absence of a complementizer. Both constraints (that-omission and factivity) can be accounted for by a constructionist fragment-based analysis, where the gapped clause is a non-finite phrase that has to address the same Question Under Discussion as its source. This explains, in turn, why embedded gapping under true factive predicates is considered significantly less acceptable. We show that the acceptable cases of embedded gapping involve true syntactic embedding (so, the matrix clause has no parenthetical use). We conclude that English has the same sensitivity to the semantic class of the matrix predicate as other languages, but that the requirements on the presence/absence of that are English specific.

Keywords

complementizerellipsisembeddingEnglishexperimental syntaxfactivitygapping
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 59 , Special Issue 2: Experimental and corpus-based approaches to ellipsis , April 2023 , pp. 389 - 426
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are extremely grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for all the hard and thorough work they put into the reviewing process of our manuscript. This research was supported by the Laboratoire d’Excellence (LabEx) Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL) project, strand 2 Experimental grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective, operation Experimental syntax (Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle & Université Paris Cité).

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