Phasehood and embedded gapping in Spanish

Abstract

This paper argues that the phasehood of the embedded CP determines the possibility of embedded gapping and accounts for the difference between English and Spanish in this regard. I argue that phasehood inheritance plays a central role in licensing embedded gapping along the lines of Wurmbrand’s (2017) phase-based approach to embedded stripping and provides a principled account of how languages differ in this respect. Assuming that ellipsis targets the complement of a phase head (Van Craenenbroeck 2004; 2010; Gengel 2009; Rouveret 2012), I argue that Spanish allows embedded gapping in which FocP is a phase, and the ellipsis site is the complement of Foc (i.e., TP). In contrast, English does not allow gapping in embedded clauses with overt complementizers, in which case CP is a phase, and the node targeted by ellipsis is FocP rather than TP. However, the absence of the complementizer renders embedded gapping acceptable; if CP loses its phasehood by deleting the complementizer, FocP becomes a derived phase, and the ellipsis site is TP. In this view, the crosslinguistic variation with respect to embedded gapping is attributed to the phasehood of the embedded CP, which sheds new light on the No Embedding Constraint on gapping.