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8 - Resumptive Pronouns in English

from Part II - Experimental Studies of Specific Phenomena

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Chung-hye Han
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Summary

In many introspective and corpus studies, inserting a resumptive pronoun in place of a gap in island-violating wh-dependency structures in English is said to amnesty, ameliorate, or repair the island violation, improving the acceptability of otherwise unacceptable structures. Most experimental studies on the acceptability of such resumptive structures, however, report that native speakers of English do not judge island-violating dependency structures with resumptive pronouns to be more acceptable than the ones with gaps. But studies testing the comprehensibility and processing of resumption report that resumptive pronouns increase the comprehensibility of island-violating structures and facilitate processing of long dependencies. These results taken together suggest that although resumptive pronouns in islands do not have an ameliorating effect on grammaticality, they may confer a processing benefit. A question, however, remains as to whether the reported enhanced comprehensibility and ease in processing actually increase the accuracy in interpreting the resumptive pronouns.

Keywords

resumptive pronounsrelative clauseswh-questionsisland-violating wh-dependencyEnglish
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 211 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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