Minding the gap?: Mechanisms underlying resumption in English

Abstract

In processing filler-gap dependencies, comprehenders quickly postulate gaps in syntactically licensed positions, but not in syntactic islands. This suggests that comprehenders can accurately use syntactic constraints to guide processing. However, resumptive pronouns appear to challenge this generalization. Resumption is ungrammatical in English. Nevertheless, they appear to immediately allow resolution of a filler dependency in syntactic islands (Hofmeister & Norcliffe 2013). I resolve this tension by arguing that pronouns are analyzed as resumptive when typical filler-gap dependency processing fails. I argue that processing a filler-gap dependency requires anticipatorily building a gapped structure. However, as further linguistic material is processed, this representation degrades in memory. Resumption facilitates processing by triggering a reference dependency, which allows the comprehender to recover a coherent interpretation of the sentence. This predicts that the accessibility of filler NP as a referent for a pronoun, length, and processing difficulty all contribute to the acceptability of resumption. I present the results of four acceptability judgment studies that support this claim. I also introduce a novel experimental paradigm, in which participants’ working memory capacity is taxed while processing a sentence. This increase in processing strain decreases sensitivity to ungrammatical filler dependencies. I argue that this partially explains the acceptability of resumption in syntactic island contexts, which are likely resource-intensive.

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