trace pronoun

[Beverly Flanigan]

Deletion is obligatory for me too, but the verb 'let' makes for an awkward
double infinitive; using 'allow to' is preferable to me.

But I'm reminded of Keenan and Comrie's (1977) accessibility hierarchy for
relative clauses, where the possessive 'whose' clause is the most difficult
to "access" except for object of comparison clauses.  Even native speakers
might say "whose mother refused to allow him to go"; and nonnative speakers
do this regularly.  As it happens, I just talked about relative clause
problems for ESL learners this week in my second language acquisition
class, citing examples like (going down the hierarchy, from easiest to
hardest):  The girl who I saw her was pretty; the girl who I gave the book
to her was absent; I found the book that John was talking about it; I know
the boy who his father died; the person who John is taller than him is
Bill.  Only the most accessible structure, the subject relative pronoun, is
"easy" for NNSs: The girl who was sick went home.  I also cite actual NNS
data from student papers, like the following two from Arabic speakers (who
have an obligatory pronominal reflex in their L1):  "I enjoy the classes of
which that I am taking them," and "My brother who that he is still in
Syria"--each having three pronouns in the relative clause!

But here's a quote from Andre Agassi a few years ago:  "And it's those that
love you the most that you want the most for them."  (His ancestral Persian
is irrelevant here, I'm sure; I've heard many native speakers do the
same.)  Then add the problem of verbs requiring an infinitive marker vs.
those that don't (to return, finally, to Ron's example), and you begin to
see the problem ESL teachers have!

At 12:11 PM 2/16/02 -0500, you 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?


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm