trace pronoun

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Saturday, February 16, 2002 12:11 pm +0000 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> The following seems unnatural to me because the pronoun HIM has not been
> deleted:
>
> FORT BRAGG -- A national organization that fights for the rights of
> homosexual service members has come to the defense of a Fort Bragg soldier
> whose superiors refuse to let him resign. [Associated Press, Durham, NC,
> HERALD, 2/16/02, B1]
>
> Do YOU have an obligatory object deletion in this syntactic environment?

I think I do, but wouldn't be surprised if I was caught saying something
like this in informal speech (which I'd think would be a processing error,
not necessarily a dialectal feature).  I'd have to delete it in writing,
though.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320