This paper argues that the phasehood of the embedded CP determines the possibility of embedded gapping and accounts for the difference between English and Spanish in this regard. I argue that phasehood inheritance plays a central role in licensing embedded gapping along the lines of Wurmbrand’s (2017) phase-based approach to embedded stripping and provides a principled account of how languages differ in this respect. Assuming that ellipsis targets the complement of a phase head (Van Craenenbroeck 2004; 2010; Gengel 2009; Rouveret 2012), I argue that Spanish allows embedded gapping in which FocP is a phase, and the ellipsis site is the complement of Foc (i.e., TP). In contrast, English does not allow gapping in embedded clauses with overt complementizers, in which case CP is a phase, and the node targeted by ellipsis is FocP rather than TP. However, the absence of the complementizer renders embedded gapping acceptable; if CP loses its phasehood by deleting the complementizer, FocP becomes a derived phase, and the ellipsis site is TP. In this view, the crosslinguistic variation with respect to embedded gapping is attributed to the phasehood of the embedded CP, which sheds new light on the No Embedding Constraint on gapping.

This paper argues that gapping in Spanish is not a single phenomenon and can be derived from different source structures. The first type of gapping in Spanish involves clausal coordination and is thus derived through TP-deletion, whereas the second type contains low coordination below TP, which allows it to be derived by either vP-deletion or Across-The-Board (ATB) verb movement whose availability depends on the subject-verb agreement patterns found in gapping. This approach also extends to cases where the conjuncts in gapping display various noncanonical word orders, which also fall under two types of gapping and can be analyzed using the same mechanisms as those applicable to SVO-conjuncts.(1) a. Juan compró un libro, y María ___ un disco. Juan bought a book and María a disk 'John bought a book, and Mary bought a disk' b. Juan me dio un libro, y María ____ un disco. Juan CL.1SG gave a book and María a disk 'John gave me a book, and Mary gave me a disk' c. Juan puede ir conmigo, y María ____ contigo. Juan can go with me and María with you 'John can go with me, and Mary can go with you' d. Juan siempre pide vino, y María ____ cerveza. Juan always orders wine and María beer 'John always orders wine, and Mary always orders beer' *I thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and constructive criticism. The research in this paper is based on Chapter 3 of my Ph.D. dissertation. All remaining errors are my own.1 The following gloss abbreviations will be used in the text: CL = clitic, DAT = dative, ACC = accusative, BENAFC = benefactive, PL = plural, SG = singular.