Resumptives, movement and interpretation

It is a minority position that resumptive structures are always created by movement. This is the null hypothesis, though, on the assumption that binders always arise via movement. We show that this position accounts naturally for a variety of data from Jordanian Arabic involving resumptive pronouns and epithets. On our specific proposal, the resumptive pronoun itself moves at LF, and then goes uninterpreted – resumptive structures in Jordanian constitute one of a number of contexts where pronouns have this happen to them. The standard arguments against movement in resumptive structures do not apply to our proposal. We suggest that our analysis extends to “intrusive” resumptive pronouns in languages like English.

Published online: 20 July 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.5.10dem