Focusing on two Romance languages, French and Romanian, we provide a detailed analysis of gapping and present several empirical arguments for preferring a construction-based approach of gapping (with semantic reconstruction of ellipsis) over alternative accounts that rely on movement or deletion. We then study parallelism constraints and show that syntactic parallelism is less strict than what is usually assumed, while discourse parallelism is clearly required. Syntax is not completely ignored though, as each remnant is required to match some subcategorization frame of the verbal predicate its correlate depends on. We show how those core properties can be accounted for within a construction-based framework relying on inheritance hierarchies of typed feature structures, such as HPSG in its more recent versions.

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François Mouret: Corrélative Coordinations in French. Two kinds of coordinate structures can be distinguished in French according to the distribution of conjunctions. In simplex coordinations, the conjunction introduces the last conjunct and optionally appears before non-initial conjuncts [ Paul (et) Jean et Marie) while in correlative coordinations, which are the focus of this paper, the conjunction appears before each conjunct, including the first one (et Paul '(et) Jean et Marie). We present arguments against asymmetric analyses according to which the initial conjunction should be analyzed as an adverb (more precisely focus-sensitive adverbs), homonymous with the conjunction and adjoined to the coordinate phrase. Instead, we adopt a construction-based variant of the symmetric analysis according to which each conjunct is introduced by one and the same conjunction. We couch our analysis in the phrase structure grammar HPSG. We assume [ conj X] phrases to be liead-complement-constructions while coordinate structures are a type of non-headed construction. We define two subtypes of coordinations to account for the distribution and spécifie properties of simplex and corrélative constructions.

It has often been argued that Non-Constituent Coordinations involve ellipsis. Focussing in this paper on so-called 'Argument Cluster Coordination', we provide empirical evidence drawn from French against such elliptical analyses. We then sketch an alternative approach within HPSG, allowing non-standard constituents to be conjoined in the scope of some shared predicate. While such non-standard constituents are generally obtained by relaxing phrase structure, we propose analyzing them as non-headed constructions, deriving their unusual properties from the interplay of two different sets of constraints: those imposed by coordination and those imposed by predicates that select such clusters as arguments.