Gapped coordinations in English: Form, usage, and implications for linguistic theory

Abstract This paper reports the results of a usage-based study of gapping (as in “I ate fish, Bill [ ] rice, and Harry [ ] roast beef”), one of the most extensively studied syntactic constructions in English. Using the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) as the database, our investigation demonstrates that gapping is an extremely marginal grammatical construction in English. It is virtually non-existent in interactive speech and has only a very limited presence in certain types of monologues and written registers. Syntactically speaking, gapping favors simple structures, linking and low transitivity verbal elements, and can ostensibly be deemed as copula-derived. From a discourse pragmatic point of view, information flow, social interaction, and stylistic functions are found to be contributing factors to the ways that gapping structures are constituted and used. Our study can thus be taken as evidence that an adequate understanding of the form and discourse functions of syntactic structures is best achieved through examinations of actual language use.