This paper argues against analyses of gapping involving VP-ellipsis or coordination, basing the argument on an understudied type of ellipsis in cleft constructions. It is shown that some types of reduced clefts (e.g. those with a VP focus) behave like gapping constructions in that they are tightly constrained by locality. A unified analysis of such reduced clefts with gapping, however, will not account for their shared properties and differences if it is based on VP-ellipsis or coordination. This paper proposes an analysis in terms of a syntactic dependency between a null-headed constituent and a fully-specified antecedent, as in Carrera Hernández's (2007) analysis of gapping.