‘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 from this perspective one well known property of resumptive relatives, namely the fact that optional resumptive pronouns trigger specificity effects. After reviewing the relevant empirical evidence (§ 2), I will briefly discuss two recent approaches to resumption that explicitly endorse interface transparency: the doubling approach developed by Boeckx (2003) (§3), and the Agree chain approach proposed by Adger & Ramchand (2005) (§4). In § 5, I tentatively explore an extension of Adger & Ramchand’s proposal which may account for the infelicity of optional resumptive pronouns in amount relatives, and in §§ 6-7, I return to the semantic side of the issue with a few inconclusive speculations. In the Appendix I briefly discuss reconstruction effects in resumptive relatives, and I explain why I believe that they do not constitute compelling evidence for a movement derivation of resumption.