Alexopoulou, Theodora and Frank Keller. 2007. Locality, Cyclicity and Resumption: At the Interface between the Grammar and the Human Sentence Processor. Language 83:1, 110-160.
This paper presents an experimental investigation of the role of resumptive pronouns in wh-extraction. We investigate object extraction in wh-questions for a range of syntactic configurations (non-islands, weak islands, strong islands) and for multiple levels of embedding (single, double, and triple). In order to establish the crosslinguistic properties of resumption, parallel experiments are conducted in three languages (English, Greek, and German).
Three main experimental results for wh-questions are reported. Firstly, resumption does not remedy island violations: resumptives are at most as acceptable as gaps, but not more acceptable. This result is at variance with claims in the literature that resumptives can "save" island variation, and has important theoretical implications. A second main finding is that embedding reduces acceptability, even in extraction out of non-islands and declaratives, structures assumed to be fully grammatical in the literature. The third main result is that non-islands and weak islands pattern together, and contrast with strong islands, in terms of the effect of resumption and embedding. Another remarkable result is the crosslinguistic consistency of our experimental findings; crosslinguistic variation seems to be confined to quantitative differences in universal principles.
We argue that these experimental results can be explained by the interaction of grammatical principles with resource limitations of the human parser. Extraction from strong islands involves grammatical violations that cannot be remedied by resumption. By contrast, extraction from non-islands and weak islands imposes increased demands on the computational resources of the parser. We show how Gibson's 1998 Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory can be extended to formalize this intuition and account for the processing complexity of A-bar dependencies.
@Article{Alexopoulou:Keller:07,
author = {Theodora Alexopoulou and Frank Keller},
title = {Locality, Cyclicity and Resumption: At the Interface between
the Grammar and the Human Sentence Processor},
journal = {Language},
volume = 83,
issue = 1,
year = 2007,
pages = {110--160}
}