resumptive pronouns

[Shalom Lappin]

Right, Hebrew permits resumptive pronouns in wh-questions as well as
relative clauses, as does Danish. Ur Shlonsky discusses resumptive
pronouns in Hebrew in several papers, and you might also look at his
book Clause Structure and Word Order In Hebrew and Arabic Syntax, Oxford
University Press, 1997. N. Erteschik-Shir and S. Lappin (1979), "Dominance
and the Functional Explanation of Island Phenomena", Theoretical Linguistics
provides an early discussion of resumptive pronoun constructions in Hebrew and
Danish. Regards.
             Shalom




>
>
> Mehran,
>
> It is actually typologically common for resumptive pronouns to be allowed
> in questions. The commonly held assumption that resumptives are somehow
> fundamentally related to relativization stems from two factors. First,
> Chomsky (1982) attempted to relate resumption to relativization, thus
> starting a research program in this direction. Second, much of the initial
> work on resumption in generative grammar was on Semitic (particularly
> Hebrew), in which it does seem more difficult to construct grammatical
> examples of resumptives in wh-questions.
>
> However, even in Hebrew it turns out to be possible, especially after
> complementizers (thus avoiding a that-trace effect) and with
> "which"-questions in certain dialects. Sells (1984) offers an excellent
> discussion of the whole relative clause/wh-question issue in resumption
> and would be a good starting point.
>
> To answer your actual question, though, here are some references for
> resumption in wh-questions, beside Sells (1984) which also discusses these
> cases: Irish (McCloskey 1979, 1990), Welsh (Willis 2000 contains a good
> selection of references on Welsh resumption, although he doesn't talk much
> about wh-questions), Igbo (Goldsmith 1981), Swedish (Zaenen, Engdahl and
> Maling 1981, Engdahl 1985), Palauan (Georgopolous 1991), and Hebrew
> (Sharvit 1999, Falk 2002).
>
> I'm currently investigating the question with respect to Farsi for my
> dissertation. I suspect that maybe you're looking at Farsi too?
>
> Hope that helped!
> Ash
>
> On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Mehran A Taghvaipour wrote:
>
> > Dear all,
> >
> > Does anyone know any language in which resumptive pronouns are allowed in
> > wh-questions?
> >
> > Regards
> > Mehran
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Mehran A Taghvaipour (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~matagh)
> > Graduate Student
> > Language and Linguistics Department
> > University of Essex
> > Colchester
> > CO4 3SQ
> > UK
> >
> >
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