Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Work on resumptive pronouns in the last 10-15 years has revealed that even in non-island contexts, the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is not uniform.  These interpretive differences can be characterized in terms of reconstruction, such that some resumptive pronouns in non-island contexts allow reconstruction and others do not (Bianchi 2004). The talk asks whether there is any principle which determines the interpretation of non-island resumptive pronouns cross-linguistically, and makes two empirical claims: (1) Reconstruction effects with resumptive pronouns are syntactic, due to the copy theory of movement.  This will entail that different interpretations are associated with different relative clause structures. In particular, there is a ‘raising’ structure for relative clauses S_R which may be realized with a resumptive pronoun.  (2) Variation in the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is regulated by the presence of alternatives: pronouns which do not vary with traces (i.e. obligatory pronouns) are interpreted like traces, and pronouns which vary with traces (i.e. optional pronouns) are not interpreted like traces; in particular, they do not reconstruct.  In the spirit of previous Economy-related treatments (Shlonsky 1992, Pesetsky 1998) I propose that the raising structure S_R has a preference for being realized with a trace, everything else being equal.