Resumptive pronouns, structural complexity, and the elusive distinction between grammar and performance: Evidence from Cantonese

Francis, Elaine J.; Lam, Charles; Zheng, Carol Chun; Hitz, John; Matthews, Stephen

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.04.006

Cited by 8 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Even though the resumptive pronoun strategy is a legitimate strategy for object relativization in Cantonese, neither adults nor children ever employed it in their object relative clause formation. This suggests that, out of the two, the gap strategy is the preferred, or default, strategy for Cantonese relativization, which echoes with the findings of Cantonese (Francis et al, 2015) and Mandarin Chinese (Ning, 2008; Su, 2004). The reason for not finding any use of the resumptive pronoun could be that the cost of producing an overt pronoun in the relativized position is larger than the benefits the processor could enjoy due to its presence.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

“…Another possible reason could be the low frequency of resumptive pronouns in the input. The resumptive pronoun strategy is not frequently adopted in spontaneous speech, according to previous studies in Mandarin (Su, 2004) and Cantonese (Francis et al, 2015). This limits the experience of young children with the use of resumptive pronouns in subject and object relativization of Cantonese.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cantonese, like Hebrew and Mandarin Chinese, allows a pronominal (9b) to alternate freely with a gap (9a) in direct object relative clauses (Matthews & Yip, 2011). An experimental study by Francis, Lam, Zheng, Hitz, and Matthews (2015) shows that both variants in Cantonese are grammatical, without any particular semantic or pragmatic implications with either variation. Native speakers rated the gapped variant and the resumptive pronoun variant with a relatively high score (gapped: 5.93 vs. RP: 5.67 on a 7-point scale) in a grammaticality judgment task and the scores for the two options are very close, suggesting that Cantonese speakers find both variants acceptable.…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

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The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition

Lau

2016

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Resumptive pronouns are often regarded as a last-resort strategy for rescuing illicit long-distance dependencies. Previous work has demonstrated a facilitative role for resumptive pronouns in production as well as in comprehension, though not a grammatical option in the languages. This study examined whether the same pattern is found in Cantonese, a language that allows resumption as a legitimate relativization strategy. Young Cantonese monolingual children were tested for both comprehension and production of object relative clauses using different relativization strategies (the gap strategy vs. the resumptive pronoun strategy). Although children did not perform better on either strategy in comprehension, and never employed resumptive pronouns in their production, resumption did prevent misanalysis of prenominal relative clauses as matrix clauses, suggesting that these elements help reveal the full structure of the relative clause to the processor. The study also showed better performance on subject than on object relative clauses, suggesting that the widely observed subject–object asymmetry also applies to Cantonese.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 98%

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The role of resumptive pronouns in Cantonese relative clause acquisition

Lau

2016

First Language

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“…It should be noted thatMcKee & McDaniel (2001) also found that RPs were significantly more preferred than gaps when the extracted element was a genitive object (e.g. "This is the pirate whose Minnie Mouse buried treasure") Francis et al (2015). more systematically tested resumption in possessive phrases in Cantonese and also found higher acceptability ratings on RPs than gaps.…”

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confidence: 87%

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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“…Cantonese (Francis et al 2015), corpus and experimental data show that speakers are more likely to produce an RP as RC complexity increases. These three types of evidence (crosslinguistic patterns of syntactic constraints, language acquisition, and language use) support…”

Section: The Use and Non-use Of Formal Ajts In Mainstream Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 96%