Resumptive Pronouns in English Relative Clauses

McKee, Cecile; McDaniel, Dana

doi:10.1207/s15327817la0902_01

Cited by 70 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…12 McKee and McDaniel (2001) found that English-speaking children's production of resumptive elements resembled those of adults, occurring mostly in unextractable sites. Thus, perhaps, for head-initial RCs (as well as for head-final RCs), one reason for using the resumptive elements is to save potentially ungrammatical structures.…”

Section: Why Are Different Types Of Errors Observed Cross-linguisticallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses: Elicited production data from Chinese children

Hsu

Hermon

Zukowski

2009

J East Asian Linguist

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This study examines young children's production of head-final relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese. Three different hypotheses (the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis, the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis, and the Structural Distance Hypothesis) have been proposed to account for the subject-object asymmetry found in children's performance with head-initial RCs in English. The structure of Chinese head-final RCs is minimally different from that of English head-initial RCs and thus provides an ideal case to examine the effect of different factors that are confounded in English. Our findings fail to support the Canonical Word Order Hypothesis and the Filler-gap Linear Distance Hypothesis. Instead, we suggest that it is the gap position in the hierarchical structure that affects children's production performance with subject-gapped and object-gapped RCs. Our findings also suggest that Mandarin Chinese does not belong to the group of East Asian languages which has been argued to have an acquisition pattern for RCs that is different from the one found in European languages. In addition, the cross-linguistic comparison of production errors suggests that the occurrence of the head noun in the sequential order of the production string affects the type of errors children make during the sentence production process.

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Section: Why Are Different Types Of Errors Observed Cross-linguisticallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses: Elicited production data from Chinese children

Hsu

Hermon

Zukowski

2009

J East Asian Linguist

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“…The use of resumptives has been noticed in previous work and has led to a debate over the structure of children's early relative clauses (cf. Labelle 1990, 1996, Pérez-Leroux 1995, Goodluck & Stojanović 1997, McKee et al 1998, McKee & McDaniel 2001. Labelle (1990) argues, based on data from French-speaking children, that the use of resumptives is incompatible with WH-movement.…”

Section: Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The majority of these investigations are concerned with children's comprehension of relative clauses in English (cf. Brown 1971, Sheldon 1974, Smith 1974, Tavakolian 1977, 1981, de Villiers et al 1979, Goodluck & Tavakolian 1982, Hamburger & Crain 1982, Tager-Flusberg 1982, Keenan & Hawkins 1987, Schuele & Nicholls 2000, McKee & McDaniel 2001, Kidd & Bavin 2002. 1 English has a wide variety of relative clauses, which are commonly classified based on two structural features: (i) the syntactic role of the HEAD, that is, the main clause element that is modified by the relative clause; and (ii) the syntactic role of the GAP, that is, the element that is gapped or relativized inside the relative clause.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses

Diessel¹,

Tomasello²

2005

lan

213

209

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This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentencerepetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old English-and German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were similar across studies: intransitive subject relatives caused fewer errors than transitive subject relatives and direct object relatives, which in turn caused fewer errors than indirect object relatives and oblique relatives; finally, genitive relatives caused by far the most problems. Challenging previous analyses in which the acquisition of relative clauses has been explained by the varying distance between filler and gap, we propose a multifactorial analysis in which the acquisition process is determined primarily by the similarity between the various types of relative clauses and their relationship to simple sentences.

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“…Among those published reports that do provide this information, a consistent pattern has been observed. In studies with children as young as age 3 years ( BarShalom, Crain & Shankweiler, 1993;McDaniel, McKee, & Bernstein, 1998;McKee & McDaniel, 2001), rates of production of subject gap (SG) relative clauses (e.g., the elephant that is flying) are very high (75Á100%) in trials designed to elicit these structures. By comparison, rates of production of object gap (OG) relative clauses (e.g., the one who the boy is kissing) are consistently lower (no higher than 55%) in trials designed to elicit these structures, and some children fail to produce any OG relative clauses at all in a testing session.…”

Section: Relative Clauses In Young Unimpaired Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elicited production of relative clauses in children with Williams syndrome

Zukowski

2008

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Resumptive Pronouns in English Relative Clauses

Cited by 70 publications

References 27 publications

Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses: Elicited production data from Chinese children

Young children’s production of head-final relative clauses: Elicited production data from Chinese children

A New Look at the Acquisition of Relative Clauses

Elicited production of relative clauses in children with Williams syndrome

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