"This volume is based on a round table on resumptive pronouns which was held at the UFR de Linguistique, Universite Paris-Diderot, on June 21 and 22, 2007."

constraints', which serve to block the association of antecedent to gap under specific syntactic conditions. Of the restrictions identified by Ross and others, the ones we will discuss here are the Complex NP Constraint, exemplified with a relative clause in (3b) and with a nominal complement in (4a), the Subject and wh Island Conditions (Chomsky, 1973) in (4b, c) respectively, and the Adjunct Island Condi tion (see Huang, 1982's Condition on Extraction Domain), illustrated in (4d, e). (4) (a) *John, Mary made the claim that Sally plans to recommend_ for ajob. John, Mary claimed that Sally plans to recommend _ for a job. As for John, Mary heard the rumor that Sally intends to marry him. (b) *John, an article about _just appeared in the newspaper. As for John, an article about him just appeared in the news paper. (c) *Bill, I wonder who likes_. As for Bill, I wonder who likes him. (d) *The heat, we left early because of _. As for the heat, we left early because of it. (e) *The money, I lied so that I could keep_. As for the money, I lied so that I could keep it.

This title is a cross-linguistic investigation of resumptive pronouns and related resumption phenomena. The author proposes a new theory of resumption based on the use of a resource logic for semantic composition and the observation that resumptive pronouns are ordinary pronouns in their morphological and lexical properties.

This book brings together contributions which address a wide range of issues regarding resumption, gathering evidence from a great variety of languages including Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, French, Vata, Hebrew, Jordanian and Palestinian Arabic. The topics covered include the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns and epithets, the featural make-up of resumptive pronouns, as well as the syntactic diversity of resumptive constructions and the nature of A-resumption. The introduction offers a critical survey of early syntactic accounts and recent semantic advancements. One contribution presents the results of experimental research providing a new perspective on the last resort status of resumption. Two seminal papers on resumption, Doron (1982) and McCloskey (1990), have also been included. This volume, which deals with a phenomenon that has given rise to intriguing claims concerning the structure and interpretation of pronouns, will be of great interest to both semanticists and syntacticians, whichever framework they favor.

This book examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the interpretation of gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. Acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Elaine J. Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally-occurring discourse can help to determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and to narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on the theoretical commitments and assumptions made, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax-semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. The volume shows that while acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints-non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

Experimental syntax is an area that is rapidly growing as linguistic research becomes increasingly focused on replicable language data, in both fieldwork and laboratory environments. The first of its kind, this handbook provides an in-depth overview of current issues and trends in this field, with contributions from leading international scholars. It pays special attention to sentence acceptability experiments, outlining current best practices in conducting tests, and pointing out promising new avenues for future research. Separate sections review research results from the past 20 years, covering specific syntactic phenomena and language types. The handbook also outlines other common psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods for studying syntax, comparing and contrasting them with acceptability experiments, and giving useful perspectives on the interplay between theoretical and experimental linguistics. Providing an up-to-date reference on this exciting field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics interested in using experimental methods to conduct syntactic research.