Abstract

Syntactic aspects of the SLF-coordination (subject gap in finite clause coordination) in German are investigated. Some empirical observations give rise to a revision of the conditions that license this type of construction: i) SLF-coordination is subject to a constraint on constituent order: scrambling in the first conjunct is restricted if the predicates in both conjuncts are formed by transitive verbs; ii) adverb-placement in the second conjunct is impossible if the adverb must be inserted in a position preceding the gap; iii) non-subject-gaps are possible with a subclass of verbs if the gap precedes the subject in base word order. These empirical facts are incompatible with analyses that either exclude the subject from the coordinated phrases or restrict the gap to the subject function. In this contribution it is argued that both conjuncts have to be parallel with respect to their respective focus potential and that the gap is restricted to a position immediately following the finite verb. In order to capture the latter fact, a condition on NP-ellipsis is proposed building on Phillips (2003) theory of incremental structure derivation.