pronoun trace

[Dennis R. Preston]

arnold,

Dag nab it! that's the point. It's a presumptive resumptive -
therefore not a resumptive (as in "presumed innocent" but turned out
to be guilty).

dInIs


>dInIs sez:
>  >I recommend that we label deletion of the sort first recommended as
>  >grammatical (which at least now Ben, Alice, Arnold and I find
>  >ungrammatical) "Presumptive Resumptive Pronoun Deletion."
>
>  >Remember, it's hard to talk about stuff without labels
>
>granted.  but this is not a good label, since the pronoun in
>question isn't resumptive.  (nice rhyme, though.)  i don't
>have a better proposal at the moment, though.  (in the provacy
>of my own mind, i've started calling the construction Gwendolyn,
>after a friend.)
>
>  >(and I'm intrigued by Arnold's notion that there is a a sort of
>  >superficial analogy going on here which causes speakers to find
>  >deletion appropriate here).
>
>i have a (slowly) developing interest in these amalgam/blend
>constructions, having spent some time on examples like
>   I don't know how many people that there were at the party.
>(where the subordinate clause has *both* an initial WH-containing
>phrase *and* the subordinator "that", so it has properties of
>subordinate interrogative WH clauses and also properties of relative
>clauses).
>
>by the way, i'm not discounting the judgments of people who find
>the missing-pronoun examples fine, though i think the matter
>deserves a lot more investigation.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)