Unacceptable but comprehensible: the facilitation effect of resumptive pronouns

‘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...

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...

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 ...

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...