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Polar Verbless Clauses and Gapping Subordination in Spanish
Abstract Polar verbless clauses and gapping seem to differ in their capacity to be embedded. While polar verbless clauses can be easily subordinated, gapping constructions are traditionally considered main clause phenomena restricted to root contexts. Nevertheless, some languages, like Farsi, Rumanian and Spanish seem to allow gapping embedding with some particular predicates. This paper provides corpus data which show the extent of the capacity of subordination of Spanish gapping constructions, and their differences to the less restricted polar verbless clauses: on the one hand, gapping, like other fragments, can be embedded by verbal and non-verbal epistemic predicates. On the other hand, polar verbless clauses can be subordinated to these predicates, but are not restricted to them. They are much more frequently embedded, as can be seen by their distribution in the different genres of the CORLEC corpus.
Keywords Polar verbless clauses, gapping, subordination, fragments, ellipsis, embedding
