ABSTRACT
gap /ɡæp/ n. A location in a sentence in which no element is overtly present even though some element appears to be in some sense grammatically required. The following examples illustrate gaps; the gaps posited are represented by the conventional symbol e: Who were you talking to e?; That bird we saw e was a Carolina warbler; This book I can certainly recommend e; I can’t speak French, but Lisa can e; Lisa speaks better French than Pierre e; I bought three bottles of red wine and two e of white wine; I ordered beef Madras and Lisa e chicken Kashmir; Which papers did you file e without reading e? Theories of grammar differ in their treatment of gaps: GB treats them as empty nodes present in the syntactic structure but unfilled by any lexical material; GPSG treats them as features on the mother node; LFG treats them as relations within f-structures. See also filler-gap dependency, empty category, parasitic gap.
