Resumptive pronoun

Resumptive pronouns have been described as "ways of salvaging a sentence that a speaker has started without realizing that it is impossible or at least difficult to finish it grammatically".

These pronouns may not be actually grammatical in some languages like English, but are inserted into some sentences for clarity when there is a great deal of embedding or distance.

An example of movement that would result in a trace would be when an auxiliary verb is moved from a main clause to the beginning of a sentence to form a question phrase.

A trace is an empty category that maintains a position in a sentence even though, in some languages, there is no surface level evidence of that linguistic element.

Traces represent the pronoun that would have been present in the embedded clause, or before the wh-movement, that is removed from the surface representation of the sentence.

[2] A conceivable way of approaching resumptive pronouns is to say that they are of the same syntactic category as gaps or traces, and that they get the same semantic translation.

Furthermore, they state that even though resumptive pronouns typically occur in syntactic islands, this is not because of switch in the category of binding.

In pre-Minimalist frameworks where derivations are independent of each other, this type of relation between two structures was unaccounted for; that is, there was no syntactic account of the ungrammaticality of cases like (5b).

The following examples are based on sentences provided in the work by McKee & McDaniel (2001) Since distance is generally irrelevant to syntactic principles, it is difficult to build a grammatical account of English resumptive pronouns in such terms.

In some languages, resumptive pronouns and traces seem to alternate relatively freely, as the Romani examples in (7) illustrate.

...a...ayidJewvosthaterheizisgevenbeenaagroyserbiglamdnscholarunandaagvir...rich-man......a yid vos er iz geven a groyser lamdn un a gvir......a Jew that he is been a big scholar and a rich-man...'...a guy who [he] was a big scholar and a rich man...'[1]Some languages, such as Italian, features grammatical resumption in some situations other than relative clauses.

In the example below, the resumptive clitic pronoun lo (which refers back to the topicalized object) is required for the sentence to be grammatical.

Sentence 3A: This syntactic tree of the sentence "That is the boy that cries loudly" demonstrates the structure when there is no resumptive pronoun used. To denote a null category, "ø" is used.
Sentence 3B: This syntactic tree of the sentence "*That is the boy that he cries loudly" demonstrates the structure when there is resumptive pronoun used. To denote a null category, "ø" is used. the "*" marks an ungrammatical sentence.
Sentence 6A: This syntactic tree of the sentence "*This is the girl that I don't know what said" demonstrates the structure when there is no obligatory resumptive pronoun used. To denote a null category, "ø" is used. The "*" marks an ungrammatical sentence
Sentence 6B: This syntactic tree of the sentence "This is the girl that I don't know what she said" demonstrates the structure when there is an obligatory resumptive pronoun used. To denote a null category, "ø" is used.