Determiner gapping as higher-order discontinuous constituency

Abstract

We argue that an approach to discontinuous constituency via prosodic lambda binding initiated by Oehrle (1994) and adopted by some subsequent authors (de Groote, 2001; Muskens, 2003; Pollard, 2011) needs to recognize higher-order prosodic variables to provide a fully systematic treatment of two recalcitrant empirical phenomena exhibiting discontinuity, namely, split gapping involving determiners and comparative subdeletion. Once we admit such higher-order prosodic variables, straightforward analyses of these phenomena immediately emerge. We take this result to provide strong support for recognizing such higher-order prosodic variables in this type of approach. We also touch on the more general issue of alternative approaches to discontinuity in categorial grammar, and suggest that an approach that recognizes (possibly higher-order) prosodic functors like the one we propose here leads to a more principled treatment of certain interactions between phenomena exhibiting complex types of discontinuity than competing approaches. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.