Resumption in English

Polinsky, Maria; Clemens, Lauren; Morgan, Adam; Xiang, Ming; Heestand, Dustin

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139035309.017

Cited by 38 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…But at least in the current form of Standard American English, RPs appear to be epiphenomenal to the production system abandoning the production of an A-bar dependency. Consistent with many previous claims (Sells 1984;Prince 1990;Erteschik-Shir 1992;Asudeh 2004Asudeh , 2011aAsudeh , 2011bAsudeh , 2012Polinsky et al 2013;Chacón 2015), RPs function as ordinary pronouns from the perspective of the producer. 5…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

“…The low acceptability of RPs reported here and elsewhere (Alexopoulou & Keller 2007, Keffala & Goodall 2011, Polinsky et al 2013 would straightforwardly reflect their ungrammaticality. As we outline above, RPs' prevalence in production, which at first glance might seem to implicate their grammaticality, can in fact be derived from knowledge of gaps in a production model that can abandon A-bar dependencies after they have been started.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Puzzlingly, recent experimental studies have demonstrated that English RPs are consistently rated as highly unacceptable, and nearly uniformly so across varying syntactic contexts (Dickey 1996;Alexopoulou & Keller 2007;Heestand et al 2011;Keffala & Goodall 2011;Clemens, Morgan, & Polinksy 2012;Han et al 2012;Polinsky et al 2013). On the most straightforward interpretation of unacceptability, this would imply that resumption is ungrammatical in English, even in domains where it is produced.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Authors such as Alexopoulou & Keller (2007) and Polinsky et al (2013) (Alexopoulou & Keller 2007, Polinsky et al 2013). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable

Morgan¹,

Wagers²

2018

Preprint

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English resumptive pronouns, as in "...the flowers that I don't know where IT came from," are enigmatic in that they are judged to be unacceptable, which would indicate that they are ungrammatical, but are regularly produced by native speakers, which is typically taken to indicate grammaticality. We report results from two studies: an acceptability judgment study on sentences with resumptive pronouns or gaps ("...the flowers that I don't know where _came from"), and a written production study which elicited sentences that required participants to produce either a gap or a resumptive pronoun in various island and non-island domains. We find that, in a given structure, resumptive pronouns are produced at a rate that negatively correlates with the acceptability of the corresponding structure with a gap in it. That is, where gaps are less acceptable, resumptive pronouns are more common. To account for these data, we offer a model of English production processes as sensitive to the acceptability of a planned utterance. When the system detects impending unacceptability, it may give up on the global plan to form a syntactic dependency. When this happens, a gap is no longer licensed and a pronoun is used to satisfy local subcategorization constraints.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Authors such as Alexopoulou & Keller (2007) and Polinsky et al (2013) (Alexopoulou & Keller 2007, Polinsky et al 2013). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable

Morgan¹,

Wagers²

2018

Preprint

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“…In neither of these tasks were RPs rated more acceptable in islands than gaps, although there was a numerical trend that with the relative clause islands the acceptability judgment was made slightly faster on the RP conditions (Experiment 2). The acceptability rating results from Heestand et al (2011) were later replicated on a set of auditorily-presented stimuli, generalizing the absence of the island-rescuing effect to a different modality (Clemens et al 2012;Polinsky et al 2013).…”

Section: The Empirical Challenge From the Acceptability Judgment Studiesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Unacceptable but comprehensible: the facilitation effect of resumptive pronouns

Beltrama

Xiang

2016

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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It is often assumed in the theoretical syntax literature that intrusive resumptive pronouns can rescue island violations. However, recent experimental investigations did not provide strong evidence for such a rescuing effect. The current study examines intrusive resumption in Italian and English. In four experiments, we show that resumption indeed improves island violation to some degree, but such an effect is sensitive to task and contextual manipulations. In particular, the rescuing effect only surfaces with a comprehensibility but not a traditional acceptability task, and the effect is strongest when the antecedent of the resumptive pronoun is made salient through additional context. At the same time, however, the effect of resumption in longer embedded clauses (compared to shorter ones) is much weaker. We discuss these findings in terms of how resumptive pronouns, although ungrammatical in English, can facilitate parsing in particular yet principled ways.

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Resumption

McCloskey

2017

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition

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In many languages and in a range of circumstances, a pronominal element may appear in a position in which one might have expected to see a gap bound by a clause‐peripheral element (in relative clauses, constituent questions, cleft constructions, and the like). Such elements (often, but not exclusively, personal pronouns) are known as resumptive elements . Since they are formally pronouns but serve many of the core semantic functions associated with movement constructions, the study of resumptive elements raises fundamental questions about the nature of movement, about the nature of anaphoric elements and relationships, and about the nature of the interaction between these two spheres. These questions have been the focus of a great deal of work, beginning especially in the middle 1970s; this chapter surveys that work – the questions that have been asked, the phenomena that have been discovered, and the current state of thinking about the relevant questions. Consideration of the theoretical questions is organized around the asking of three questions: (i) what are the properties of resumptive elements; (ii) in what ways do they share, or fail to share, properties of movement constructions (island phenomena, reconstruction effects); and (iii) in what ways do they share, or fail to share, properties of anaphoric elements and interactions? In recent years especially, the study of resumption has been enriched by a great deal of experimental work, aimed not only at establishing some basic properties of resumptive elements, but also at better understanding the mechanisms involved in their production and comprehension. The chapter ends with a consideration of that work and its implications. Here, the central question that emerges quickly is that of how theories of competence and theories of performance interact with one another.

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Resumption in English

Cited by 38 publications

References 44 publications

English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable

English Resumptive Pronouns are More Common where Gaps are Less Acceptable

Unacceptable but comprehensible: the facilitation effect of resumptive pronouns

Resumption

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