A two-source hypothesis for Gapping

In this paper, we argue that Gapping constructions like Jessie might order beans and Kerry rice are ambiguous between two structures: CP domain coordinate structures, and vP domain coordinate structures. Initial evidence for this structural ambiguity analysis comes from the scope ambiguity that such examples exhibit: scopal elements above the vP domain, such as the modal auxiliary might, can take wide scope above the coordinate structure, or distributive scope, under it. Scopal elements within the vP domain, like manner adverbs, take only distributive scope. This distribution follows directly from our two-source analysis: ambiguous scopal material is either contained within the CP sized conjuncts, yielding a distributive interpretation, or it occupies a position above, and thus scopes over, the vP domain coordinate structure. We then show that our structural ambiguity analysis correctly predicts that the distribution of the Gapping scope ambiguity interacts with seemingly independent syntactic properties, with the effect that only one or the other reading is available in certain syntactic contexts.