Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics XXI, 2, 81-100, ISSN 2392-8093, ISSN-L 2069-9239 DOI: 10.31178/BWPL.21.2.4 ELLIPSIS AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE: EVIDENCE FROM ROMANIAN GAPPING Gabriela Bîlbîie * Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to investigate the information structure of gapping, a linguistic level which has been much less studied than syntax or semantics. Romanian is a good test case for such a study, since it displays a specific contrastive conjunction iar, which occurs frequently with gapping and which severely restricts the information structure ordering. We explain its high frequency with ellipsis by the fact that it shares several crucial constraints with gapping. Our data show that the contrastive pairs with iar do not have the same contribution: one pair contains contrastive topics, and the other foci. However, the order of the correlates in the source clause does not necessarily match the order of the remnants in the gapped clause. We use a QUD model, based on question-answer congruence, which is very useful for a careful investigation of the discourse and information structure of ellipsis. Keywords: gapping, discourse, contrast, focus, contrastive topic 1. Introduction While ellipsis has been a topic of interest for decades, the literature on ellipsis has mostly concentrated on the way the usual form/meaning mapping may be articulated with respect to ellipsis phenomena. Ellipsis seems to involve a form/meaning mismatch (significatio ex nihilo): on the one hand, part of the material necessary for the interpretation is missing in the syntactic structure (“incomplete” syntax), and on the other hand, the missing material is recovered from an antecedent in the context. Two main competing accounts have been proposed in the so-called syntax/semantics debate: on the one hand, structural approaches based on syntactic reconstruction, positing more abstract syntactic structures within theories of grammars that allow unpronounced phrases and heads (e.g. deletion accounts, cf. Ross 1967, Sag 1976, Hankamer 1971, Hartmann 2000, Merchant 2001, 2004, etc.); on the other hand, non-structural approaches based on semantic reconstruction, which supplement the theory of meanings, by creating or exploiting devices that can generate meanings in the absence of syntactic structure (Dalrymple et al. 1991, Ginzburg and Sag 2000, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, etc.). While most evidence for or against structure in ellipsis concentrates on syntactic issues (e.g. connectivity effects, locality effects, preposition-stranding generalization, etc., cf. Merchant 2001, 2004, 2018), less attention has been paid to other linguistic levels, such as information structure. The goal of this paper is to examine ellipsis from an information structure perspective, and in particular to observe the specific information structure constraints which are at work in gapping constructions. The paper is structured as follows: In section 2, we review the literature on the information structure of ellipsis in general, by focusing on the central notions, such as focus, givenness and contrastive topic. In section 3, we * University of Bucharest and Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (Paris), gabriela.bilbiie@gmail.com.