Syntax literature reports that resumptive pronouns (RPs) ameliorate island violations, but much psycholinguistics literature has found RPs to be no more acceptable than straightforwardly island-violating gaps, even though island production tasks consistently elicit RPs. However, psycholinguistic studies have typically compared RP and illicit gap conditions indirectly. We posit that RP island amelioration in comprehension is undetectable when participants cannot compare alternative sentences, and thus that the apparent production/comprehension split arises from methodological differences between perception and production experiments. We present six experiments crossing three island types in two tasks (full-sentence forced choice and forced-choice fill-in-the-blank), manipulating gap location (island vs. nonisland). We find that RPs are preferred in islands and gaps in nonislands ( p = .0001). This suggests that RPs do ameliorate island violations and that the production/comprehension split is a methodological artifact.

This squib presents a restriction on the phenomenon descriptively known as ‘‘vehicle change’’ that has not, to our knowledge, previously been noted. With vehicle change construed as a kind of ‘‘tolerable mismatch’’ between an ellipsis site and its antecedent, the data we present suggest that exactly the same mismatches cannot be tolerated between the members of a movement chain. While in principle one might consider the possibility that ellipsis and movement could be reduced to the same operation ( Chomsky 1995:252–253 )—that the deletion usually described as ellipsis might be the same operation as the deletion or ‘‘chopping’’ (in the sense of Ross 1967) that applies to the unpronounced (usually lower) copy in a movement chain—the differences in the kinds of mismatches that can be tolerated will pose a difficulty for this unification. We present the crucial data that suggest that such a unification is not tenable in section 1 and then outline an explanation of these facts in section 2 . We state this explanation in terms of the way movement, ellipsis, and vehicle change interact, while remaining largely agnostic about the exact mechanisms that implement these somewhat pretheoretic notions. In section 3 , we consider the consequences for these more fine-grained questions about the nature of ellipsis and movement, and in section 4 , we consider some further implications that depend on how vehicle change is understood. Section 5 addresses a challenge for our proposed explanation that turns out to be only illusory, and section 6 briefly concludes.

In this article, we investigate idiom reconstruction in the context of sluicing constructions. We demonstrate that some idioms in English are not compatible with resumptive pronouns. On the basis of this observation, we argue that sluicing involves wh -gap dependencies rather than wh -resumptive pronoun dependencies, and that the island amelioration effect of sluicing does not result primarily from the island amelioration effect of resumptive pronouns.

We argue that the gapping-like constructions in the nominal domain (nominal gapping: NG) and regular gapping constructions seen in clauses (verbal gapping: VG) show quite different properties. First, VG obeys the Coordination Constraint but NG does not. Second, in terms of locality, NG allows free embedding but VG does not. Third, the scope properties exhibited in VG are not seen in NG. Fourth, socalled cross-conjunct binding, which is sometimes taken as strong evidence for the across-the-board movement analysis of VG, is not seen in NG in the same way as in VG, even in the environments where locality requirements for across-the-board movement are met. We argue that the derivation of NG does not involve across-the-board movement. Instead, NG is best analyzed as involving ellipsis.