Ivy Sichel will give a talk entitled "(Resumptive) Pronouns and Competition" at 3:30 in the Partee Room on Friday, May 3. An abstract follows.
A Minimalist hypothesis about resumptive pronouns is that they should be no different from ordinary pronouns (McCloskey 2006). This paper substantiates the Minimalist hypothesis with respect to a particular view of pronouns: pronouns are ‘elsewhere’ elements. Just as the interpretation of ordinary pronouns, on this view, is determined by competition with anaphors, it is argued that the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is determined by competition with gaps. Based on systematic differences between optional and obligatory pronouns, I argue that the tail of a relative clause movement chain is realized as the least specified form available, ultimately a gap. Since the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns are fully determined by external factors, pronouns must be part of the syntactic derivation, and not lexical items merged from the (traditional) lexicon.
