AGAINST SYNTACTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANIAN GAPPING Gabriela Bîlbîie Abstract: It has often been argued that non-constituent coordination (such as argument cluster coordination, right node raising and gapping) involves ellipsis. Focusing in this paper on gapping constructions, we provide empirical evidence drawn from Romanian against strict parallelism and syntactic reconstruction (achieved by a deletion process) and argue in favor of a surface and semantically-oriented approach. We propose a simpler syntactic analysis in terms of fragment, conceived as a fully grammatical structure that is a proper part of the grammar. Keywords: ellipsis, reconstruction, fragment, gapping 1. Introduction * The data in (1) illustrate the phenomenon usually referred to as gapping, in which a complete sentence is combined with some elliptical one (or more), missing (at least) its main verb and optionally other elements (complements, subject or adjuncts), while two other constituents are left overt (Ross 1967). One of the overt constituents is typically (but not necessarily) the subject of the clause. (1) a. [John likes apples] and [[Bob] [bananas]]. b. [John tried to begin to write a poem] and [[Bill] [a song]]. c. [John will bring some flowers to Mary ] and [either [[Bill] [some wine]] or [[Jane] [some whiskey]]]. d. [Jim flew to London on Sunday] and [[Mary] [on Thursday]]. It is generally assumed that there is a correlation between word order and the direction of gapping across languages. Thus, head-initial languages, like English, French, Romanian, etc., have gaps in the second conjunct (i.e. forward gapping), while in verb-final languages, like Japanese or Korean, the gapped constituent comes in the first conjunct (i.e. backward gapping). Non-constituent coordination phenomena remain a challenge for both derivational and non derivational frameworks relying on phrase structure, the most widespread view being that apparent non-constituents involve some elliptical process. The basic issue raised by gapping constructions is that which is raised by ellipsis in general, namely to determine the level at which the missing material is to be reconstructed. Analyses of elliptical constructions fall into three general types characterized by the level of information at which they assume that the resolution of ellipsis takes place. According to the syntactic approach, one way to analyse the gapping cases is by appealing for a covert syntactic structure which is present in the ellipsis site at some level of derivation; as a result, gapping is analysed as a coordination of two full sentences. This kind of approach typically involves deletion of syntactic material in the ellipsis site, as we can see in (2a) (Ross * Part of this work has been presented in Paris (International Conference on Elliptical Constructions, June 2008), Seoul (SICOGG 10), Austin (ICCG 5) and Jerusalem (IATL 24). Many thanks to Peter Culicover, Frederick Hoyt, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Jason Merchant and the audience of these conferences for helpful discussions and / or useful suggestions. Finally, we are grateful to Anne Abeillé and François Mouret for various contributions to this work.