SUBORDINATE GAPS IN MANDARIN CHINESE

The existence of subordinate gaps in Mandarin Chinese casts doubt on analyses built on canonical coordinate gapping. We observe that the minimality of contrastive focus and the type of subordinate clause determine the acceptability of a missing gap in subordinate structure. Along this vein, we propose that a semantic-based deletion account can be used to interpret gapping in Mandarin. Such account relies on two violable constraints, AvoidF and Focus condition on gapping (Schwarzchild 1999, Merchant 2001) to compute the acceptability of a gap.