In generative grammar, a parasitic gap is a construction in which one gap appears to be dependent on another gap. Thus, the one gap can appear only by virtue of the appearance of the other gap, hence the former is said to be "parasitic" on the latter. For example, in the example sentence in (1) the first gap is represented by an underscore ( __ ), and appears as a result of movement of the constituent which explanation to the beginning of the sentence. The second gap is represented by an underscore with a subscript p ( ___p); this is the "parasitic gap".

While parasitic gaps are present in English and some related Germanic languages, e.g. Swedish (see Engdahl 1983), their appearance is much more restricted in other, closely related languages, e.g. German and the Romance languages. Japanese linguistic scholar Fumikazu Niinuma has attempted to differentiate between parasitic gaps and coordination in his research, as he believes the two are often confused.

An aspect of parasitic gaps that makes them particularly mysterious is the fact they usually appear inside islands to extraction. Although the study of parasitic gaps began in the late 1970s, no consensus has yet been reached about the best analysis.