Resumptive Pronouns Can Ameliorate Illicit Island Extractions

Abstract

Syntax literature reports that resumptive pronouns (RPs) ameliorate island violations, but much psycholinguistics literature has found RPs to be no more acceptable than straightforwardly island-violating gaps, even though island production tasks consistently elicit RPs. However, psycholinguistic studies have typically compared RP and illicit gap conditions indirectly. We posit that RP island amelioration in comprehension is undetectable when participants cannot compare alternative sentences, and thus that the apparent production/comprehension split arises from methodological differences between perception and production experiments. We present six experiments crossing three island types in two tasks (full-sentence forced choice and forced-choice fill-in-the-blank), manipulating gap location (island vs. nonisland). We find that RPs are preferred in islands and gaps in nonislands ( p = .0001). This suggests that RPs do ameliorate island violations and that the production/comprehension split is a methodological artifact.

Resumption ameliorates different islands differentially

“…The vast majority of studies suggest that resumption does not significantly rescue an island violation (Alexopoulou & Keller, 2007;Heestand, Xiang, & Polinsky, 2011;Clemens, Scontras, &Polinsky, 2012 andPolinsky, Clemens, Morgan, Xi-ang, &Heestand, 2013). 10 This is not a ubiquitous finding, however, as Ackerman, Frazier, & Yoshida (2015) have shown that forced-choice tasks do reveal some measure of acceptability judgment amelioration in islands, a result which aligns with the theoretical literature's conclusion that gaps are strongly unavailable inside islands. Finally, Beltrama & Xiang (2017) have suggested that grammaticality or acceptability may not be improved by resumption in an island, but comprehensibility may be, insofar as speakers reported sentences with a resumptive pronoun as more interpretable than those with gaps.…”

“…It is therefore possible to describe the ameliorative effect as "mak[ing] the best of a bad job" (Langendoen, 1970). Whether this qualifies as grammatical amelioration depends upon one's syntactic theory, but we can note that this might be the principle underlying the occasional report that resumption ameliorates islands in English (Ackerman et al, 2015), since those studies involved force-choice tasks between gapping and resumption structures.…”

Wh-Movement, Islands, and Resumption in L1 and L2 Spanish: Is (Un)Grammaticality the Relevant Property?

“…This made McDaniel and Cowart (1999) conclude that resumptive pronouns do not repair violations of the derivation (movement violations), and that they are spell-outs of traces. On the other hand, Ackerman et al (2018), using several off-line forced-choice binary tasks, found that speakers of English strongly preferred RPs in island contexts, concluding that RPs indeed ameliorated island-violating sentences and questioned the assumed ungrammaticality of object-extracted resumptive pronouns in English.…”

Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

“…Secondly, this proposal makes no reference to islandhood as such. The significant majority of work on resumption in theoretical syntax (Ross 1967;Boeckx 2003) and experimental syntax (McDaniel & Cowart 1999;McKee & McDaniel 2001;Omaki & Nakao 2010;Heestand et al 2011;Han et al 2012;Keffala 2013;Ackerman et al 2018) specifically addresses the interaction between syntactic islands and resumption. On my proposal, islands are only relevant insofar as they tax memory resources (Kluender & Kutas 1993;Kluender 1998;Hofmeister & Sag 2010, but see Sprouse et al 2012, contributing to the decay of a representation of a gapped structure.…”

“…However, subsequent work suggests that, in English, resumptive pronouns are perceived to be ungrammatical. Resumptive pronouns are used because they can facilitate processing, particularly in sentence production (Kroch 1981;Chao & Sells 1983;Creswell 2002;Ferreira & Swets 2005;Heestand et al 2011;Asudeh 2012;Keffala 2013;Beltrama & Xiang 2016; see also Ackerman et al 2018). Resumptive pronouns do not display the same grammatical characteristics as grammatical filler-gap dependencies (Chao & Sells 1983), and they are assigned low ratings in off-line acceptability judgment tasks (Alexopoulou & Keller 2007;Heestand et al 2011).…”