Toward a uniform analysis of short answers and gapping

Abstract

Starting from Rooth’s (1992a) theory on question/answer congruence, this paper argues, first, that Rooth’s semantic requirement on congruent sentential answers is already a sufficient condition to license ellipsis in sentential answers, and, second, that this approach to short answers can be straightforwardly generalized to gapping: whereas short answers directly relate to an explicitly mentioned wh-question, first conjuncts in gapping constructions trigger —via the information structure they carry — an implicit question under discussion, which gets, in a way, ‘answered ’ by non-first conjuncts. It is argued that such an approach elegantly accounts for the central properties common to short answers and gapping, and that this analysis of gapping may shed some light on the question of how discourse is organized by questions under discussion.

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