Topic-Comment Structure, Focus Movement, and Gapping Formation

While canonical gapping in English can be analyzed as either VP-ellipsis (e.g., , , , , , , , , ) or across-the-board V/VP-movement (, , , ), certain English-like gapping constructions in Modern Mandarin are argued to be multiple sentence fragments, formed by a series of syntactic operations that involve topicalization, focus movement, and IP-deletion.