Ā-dependencies occur when an argument appears clause-peripherally, dislocated from its canonical base position, as in relative clauses (1a). The displaced argument is a filler (italicized in (1) and throughout), and the base position is typically realized as a gap—that is, a syntactic category that is not pronounced (represented by an underscore throughout). A subset of languages that employ the filler-gap strategy, including Arabic (Aoun and Choueiri 1996), Irish (McCloskey 2006), Swedish (Engdahl 1986), and Vata (Koopman and Sportiche 1986), also use a second strategy to realize Ā-dependencies: resumption. Here, the base position is “filled” by an ordinary-looking resumptive pronoun (RP, boldfaced throughout).

Bennett (2008) finds 66 instances of resumption in the Switchboard corpus (6,138 tagged five-minute telephone conversations), and Ferreira and Swets (2005) successfully elicited RPs in a production task by encouraging their participants to produce Ā-dependencies...

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