Resumptive Pronouns Can Ameliorate Illicit Island Extractions

Resumptive Pronouns, Wh-island Violations, and Sentence Production

Syntactic Ergativity in Tongan: Resumptive Pronouns Revisited

Introduction It is well known that so-called ergative languages are classified roughly into two groups: those which show an ergative pattern only at the morphological level and those which exhibit an ergative pattern also at the syntactic level. Syntactic ergativity is a curious phenomenon in the following respects. First, while there is apparently some correlation between morphological and syn...

‘specificity Effects’ of Optional Resumptive Pronouns

Recent developments in the minimalist framework emphasise the importance of the interface between the narrow-syntactic component and the semantic (Conceptual-Intentional) component(s). Accordingly, recent syntactic theorising often endorses a desideratum of ‘interface transparency’: syntactic structures should be transparently legible for the C-I component(s). In this paper I wish to discuss fr...

The Production and Comprehension of Resumptive Pronouns in Relative Clause “Island” Contexts

Draft: Please do not distribute or quote.

Traceless relatives: Agrammatic comprehension of relative clauses with resumptive pronouns

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia fail to interpret reversible movement-derived sentences. According to the Trace Deletion Hypothesis, this impairment in comprehension results from the deletion of traces of phrasal movement. In order to test this hypothesis, we compared object relatives with a trace to identical object relatives that are not derived by syntactic movement and do not include a ...