Syntax and Discourse: A Look at Resumptive Pronouns

Optimality Theory, markedness and second language syntax: the case of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses

Eckman, Fred R. 2004. Optimality Theory, markedness and second language syntax: the case of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 10.1. 89–110. This paper proposes a constraint-based analysis for what is arguably the most interesting phenomenon in second language (L2) syntax, the occurrence of an L2 error pattern where the regularity cannot be e...

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...

Resumptive Pronouns, Wh-island Violations, and Sentence Production

A Glue/λ-DRT Treatment of Resumptive Pronouns

Anaphora and resumption, phenomena which intuitively seem to challenge resource sensitivity, have been argued to support its role in Glue. The resource deletion treatment of resumption in LFG Glue presented by Asudeh (2004) was designed to work together with the Glue resource duplication treatment of anaphora (Dalrymple et al., 1999). However, as ‘resumptive pronouns’ are mere pronouns, the cho...