Topics in Resumptivity

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Resumptive pronouns are pronominal elements (typically pronouns) that appear in the positions one might other- wise have expected to find a gap (e.g. 'She’s the kind of employee that you never really know if {she / *__ } will show up to work on time'). Resumptive phenomena have figured prominently in work on long-distance dependencies, in particular concerning the capacity of resumption to void island violations. One of the central questions guiding this research has been: what properties do dependencies terminating in resumptive pronouns share with similar dependencies terminating in gaps? The results of this work have uncovered a heterogeneous picture of resumptivity across—and even within—languages. In this seminar, we will explore the cross-linguistically rich empirical landscape of resumption, including (canonical) resumption in wh-questions and relative clauses, resumption in dislocation constructions (e.g. clitic left dislocation), and resumption in A-dependencies (e.g. copy raising). Furthermore, we will investigate what implications these diverse phenomena have for our understanding of several central concepts in the theory of syntax, including: cyclicity, (morphosyntactic) connectivity, reconstruction, competition and last resort, and (defective) multiple copy spellout and the syntax-PF mapping.