New article by Prof. Idan Landau

A new article was published by Professor Idan Landau, named:

Back to the base: Resumption in Hebrew without movement

(Published in Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics)

Abstract:

Resumptive pronouns (RP s) in Hebrew are productively used in relative clauses and other Ā-dependencies. In accusative and embedded nominative positions, they alternate with gaps, but in oblique and genitive positions they are obligatory. An influential proposal takes the former type of RP s to be base-generated and the latter type to be a residue of movement (“realizational RP s”); concomitantly, only the latter type is expected to display reconstruction effects. I argue that there are no realizational RP s in Hebrew—all RP s are base-generated alike. Furthermore, all RP s in the language display full reconstruction effects, even inside islands, a pattern observed across a range of Arabic dialects as well. Reconstruction is thus dissociated from movement and is instead explained by NP-ellipsis inside the resumptive DP, now seen as an E-type pronoun. We discuss a range of syntactic and semantic discrepancies between RP s and gaps, which are inexplicable on the realizational view, but receive a natural account on the E-type analysis of RP s.

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