A Discourse Processing Account of Gapping and Causal Implicature

Levin and Prince (1982) note that gapped sentences do not give rise to causal implicatures often associated with their nongapped counterparts. For instance, while (a) can have both a symmetric and asymmetric (causal) reading, the gapped version in (b) can only have the symmetric reading. (a) Sue became upset and Nan became downright angry. (b) Sue became upset and Nan ; downright angry. We show that this fact falls out from a discourse processing architecture designed to account for VP-ellipsis data (Kehler, 1993b). Evidence is given that VP-ellipsis requires a surface-syntactic antecedent in`parallel' constructions (e.g., symmetricànd') but only a suitable semantic antecedent in`non-parallel' constructions (e.g., asymmetricànd'). The architecture predicts that the syntactic gapping operation is unacceptable in those contexts where VP-ellipsis obtains semantic antecedents. This accords with the facts noticed by Levin and Prince as well as the lack of gapping in other non-parallel constructions.