A Crosslinguistic, Experimental Study of Resumptive Pronouns and that-Trace Effects

We present two magnitude estimation experiments on the role of resumptive pronouns in subject extraction in English and German. In the theoretical literature, resumptives have been claimed to remedy effects of island violations, but our results show that this is not the case. Furthermore, our data also confirm the existence of a that-trace effect for both languages, contrary to theoretical claims that this effect is not present in German. On a methodological level, our study demonstrates the importance of controlled experiments for obtaining theoretically crucial linguistic judgments, and the potential of the magnitude estimation paradigm for crosslinguistic comparisons.