Resumptive pronouns facilitate processing of long-distance relative clause dependencies in second language English

This study provides evidence that resumptive pronouns (RPs) can facilitate the processing of long-distance subject relative clause (RC) dependencies during second language (L2) sentence comprehension, even where they are disallowed in both the first language (L1) and the target language. A test group of 29 L1-Korean L2 learners (L2ers) of English and a control group of 25 native English speakers completed an online self-paced reading task (SPRT) and an offline acceptability judgment task (AJT) designed to test whether RPs reflect Interlanguage grammar representations and/or a strategy to alleviate processing overload. Analysis of the SPRT data from both response times and comprehension question accuracy indicates that RPs assisted the L2ers, but not the native speakers, with dependency resolution in long-distance RCs. For the AJT data, a proficiency effect was observed whereby some lower-proficiency L2ers, but not the higher-proficiency ones or the native speakers, tended to prefer RPs over gaps in long-distance RCs. The implications of these findings and plans for future research are discussed.

The Pronoun Which Comprehenders Who Process It in Islands Derive a Benefit

There is ongoing debate about the role that resumptive pronouns play in the processing of islands in intrusive resumption languages such as English. This squib provides evidence that resumptive pronouns facilitate the comprehension of islands in online processing. The results fall in line with filler-gap processing more generally: when fillers are difficult or impossible to keep active, resumption provides support for forming a dependency. This occurs when dependencies span multiple clauses, when memory resources are otherwise taxed, or, as the present paper shows, when grammatical constraints such as islands prohibit the use of the active filler strategy.

Resumption and Optionality in Arabic Definite Restrictive Relatives

The present study examines the claim that definite relative clauses in Modern Standard Arabic exhibit free variation between resumptive pronouns and gaps. The implication of such a claim presents a problem for minimalist syntax that does not tolerate true optionality. To solve this problem, the study argues that the original claim is incorrect and that despite similarities in the PF outputs, resumptive relatives are syntactically different from gapped relatives. While the latter is derived from a standard VSO structure, I propose, the former is derived from a topic-comment structure that already contains an RP. Thus, the fact that resumptive relatives contain resumptive pronouns has nothing to do with relativization, as is generally assumed. The study demonstrates that both resumptive relatives and gapped relatives are derived by movement in contexts that do not involve islands. As it turns out, resumption in relatives is used only as a last resort strategy to save structures in which movement is genuinely blocked, such as islands, from crash. Altogether the study concludes that the variation observed does not reflect true optionality, a finding that supports robust economy principles of minimalist syntax.

Resumptive Pronouns in Language Comprehension and Production

Although the grammatical status of resumptive pronouns varies from one language to the other, these elements occur in spontaneous speech cross-linguistically, giving rise to a long-held intuition that resumption has a processing function, facilitating production and/or comprehension. In this review, I examine the central threads of thought related to resumption and processing and consider the prominent theories and findings that have shaped the discussion on this issue. I review grammatical and grammaticalization-based approaches to resumption and present the evidence suggesting that resumptive pronouns are a production artifact as well as the evidence that speaks in favor of or against the idea that resumptive pronouns aid comprehension. While the theory that resumption aids the producer receives straightforward support, the findings backing the claim that resumption helps the comprehender are much more equivocal, suggesting that in some cases resumption is not helpful and may even be detrimental to comprehension. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Two Types of Resumptive Pronouns in Swahili

In this article, I demonstrate that Swahili distinguishes two types of resumptive pronouns: (a) lower Ā-movement copies and (b) base-generated bound pronouns. These two types of resumptive pronouns are morphologically distinct: the presence of (local) person features reflects a base-generated derivation, and the absence of person features reflects Ā-movement. Crucial evidence comes from local person pro-nominal clefts derived from islands (bound pronoun context) and parasitic gaps (movement copy context). Inspired by Van Urk 2018, I analyze this pattern using Landau’s (2006) theory of chain reduction in which only movement copies create chains and are then subject to an algorithm that deletes person features.

Relative Clause Formation in Akan Proverbs and Sentences: Similarities and Differences

This paper discusses relative clause formation in Akan proverbs and normal sentences with particular attention to their similarities and differences. It explores the comparison of the relative clauses in Akan sentences and other specialized genres such as the proverbs. The paper further analyzes the relative clause occurring in both sentence and proverb structures in order to establish sameness and dichotomy in the syntactic uniqueness in both structures. Purposive sampling technique was employed to select the proverbs for this study. In all, twenty-three (23) proverbs were selected for the study. The study adopted the functional grammar approach in the analysis. The study revealed that the relative clause formation in some Akan proverbs and Akan normal sentences has both overt and covert antecedent noun phrases (ANPs). The headless antecedent noun phrase which is seen as a pronominal also undergoes binary mutation in order to account for the antecedent noun phrase and the relativizer which introduces the relative clause. There are also differences in the syntactic positions of the relative clause more especially the sentence structure type. Finally, there is a difference in the syntactic position of the resumptive pronouns in both structures.

On the Universality of Intrusive Resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan

The literature on resumptive pronouns (RPs) has given rise to a rich taxonomy of the phenomenon. Despite the fact that RPs invariably have the morphosyntactic form of ordinary pronouns, they vary widely in distribution and function. In some languages RPs are grammatically licensed; depending on the language and the syntactic context, they might or might not realize traces, compete with gaps, exhibit reconstruction effects, and so on. In other languages, notably English, RPs are ‘intrusive’ (Sells, 1984). Kroch (1981), Asudeh (2004), Morgan and Wagers (2018), and others have proposed that intrusive RPs in English are ungrammatical products of the performance system -- productions that satisfy local well- formedness but not global well-formedness. This account predicts that in every language, regardless of whether it has grammatically licensed RPs, intrusive RPs could also be found. Here we test this prediction against evidence from Chamorro and Palauan. Previous accounts have maintained that Chamorro does not have RPs and Palauan has only RPs. On the basis of corpus and elicited production data from Chamorro, and a re-examination of the Palauan evidence, we argue that both languages have grammatically licensed RPs, as well as intrusive RPs. Their grammatically licensed RPs differ in form and distribution. At least in Chamorro, the distribution of intrusive RPs produced is similar to that in English.