Voice mismatch between conjuncts is impossible in the gapping construction. Some recent studies explained this effect by analyzing gapping as involving the ellipsis of a category at least as large as VoiceP. One prediction this analysis makes is that mismatch of any head structurally lower than Voice should not be possible in gapping. In this study, through a series of acceptability judgment experiments examining argument structure mismatches in gapping, we provide empirical observations that challenge this prediction.

Williams (1983) andPartee(1986a) argued that specificational sentences like (2) result from “inversion around the copula”: that NP1 is a predicate (type ) and NP2 is the subject, a referential expression of type e. Partee(1999) argued that such an analysis is right for Russian, citing arguments from Padučeva & Uspenskij (1979) that NP2 is the subject of sentence (1). But in that paper I argued that differences between Russian and English suggest that in English there is no such inversion, contra Williams (...) (1983) and Partee (1986a): the subject of (2) is NP1, and both NPs are of type e, but with NP1 less referential than NP2, perhaps “attributive”. (shrink)