Experimental evidence for a minimalist account of English resumptive pronouns

COGNITION Cognition 70 (1999) B15–B24

Brief article

Experimental evidence for a minimalist account of English resumptive pronouns Dana McDaniel, Wayne Cowart* University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME 04104-9300, USA Received 5 June 1998; accepted 26 January 1999

Abstract In this article we provide evidence for a Minimalist account of English-type resumptive pronouns. Our findings provide empirical support for syntactic theories that, like Minimalist accounts, allow for competition among derivations. According to our account, resumptive pronouns are spell-outs of traces. For reasons of economy, the resumptive pronoun surfaces only when the derivation with the trace is precluded by syntactic principles. This account predicts that resumptive pronouns should only improve violations of constraints on representation, and not violations of constraints on movement. We tested this prediction by conducting an acceptability judgment task with 36 native speakers of English. The results bore out our prediction; subjects preferred the resumptive pronoun over the trace in cases where the trace itself was illicit, but not in cases where only the movement operation was illicit.  1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Experimental syntax; Resumptive pronoun; Minimalism; Economy; Constraints on movement; Constraints on representation

1. Introduction Chomsky (1995), and sources cited therein, introduced the Minimalist Program, a framework that stripped away many of the mechanisms previously used in syntactic theory. The goal is to account for syntactic data largely as a consequence of requirements of the interfaces between syntax and phonetic form or * Corresponding author.

0010-0277/99/$ - see front matter  1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0010 -0 277(99)00006 -2

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between syntax and interpretation, rather than as a consequence of purely syntactic principles. The only syntactic principle is that of Economy, according to which syntactic derivations must involve as few steps as possible. If two derivations are based on the same numeration (set of items drawn from the lexicon), only the one involving the fewest steps will be grammatical. In earlier frameworks, derivations were not claimed to compete in this sense, so that more than one derivation based on the same numeration could result in a grammatical string. This difference leads to differing predictions. The Minimalist Program has difficulty dealing with certain cases of apparent optionality. On the other hand, earlier frameworks had difficulty dealing with cases where an aspect of grammar appeared to serve a ‘saving’ function, i.e. cases where the possibility of one construction seemed dependent on the impossibility of a related construction. English resumptive pronouns are just such a case. Resumptive pronouns in English have been described as serving a ‘saving’ function, in the sense that they are possible only when the counterpart with a trace is ruled out (Chomsky, 1982; Sells, 1984). This is illustrated in (1) and (2), where the status of the resumptive pronoun sentence (the (b) examples) depends on the status of the counterparts with traces (the (a) examples). (1a) That s the girl that I met last year: 0

(1b) p That s the girl that I met her last year: 0

(2a) p That s the girl that I wonder when met you: 0

(2b) ?That s the girl that I wonder when she met you: 0

In pre-Minimalist frameworks, this phenomenon was difficult to account for. Since all operations were optional, the status of one derivation should not affect the status of another. Various accounts were offered for the possibility of sentences like (2b). Chomsky (1982) assumed that the resumptive pronouns were base-generated, so that the derivation did not involve movement, whereas Kayne (1981) proposed that the resumptive pronouns were spell-outs of traces. The problem with any type of account was that there was no obvious way to rule out sentences like (1b). Even assuming that resumptive pronouns have a marginal status in English, sentences like (1b) should be as good as sentences like (2b). The framework provided no way to rule out (1b) based on the grammaticality of (1a). Within the Minimalist Program, on the other hand, the type of pattern exemplified in (1) and (2) is predicted to occur, since derivations are claimed to compete with one another in such a way that only the most economical one produces a grammatical output. In this article, we propose a Minimalist account of English-type resumptive pronouns. We focus on one prediction of this account involving different types of constraints on movement structures. We then provide experimental evidence that bears out the prediction. These results also argue for the utility of experimental methods as a tool for syntactic inquiry.

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2. A Minimalist account of resumptive pronouns According to Minimalist assumptions, derivations compete if and only if they come from the same numeration. Thus, in order to account for the saving function of resumptive pronouns as the result of competing derivations, we must analyze the construction with the resumptive pronoun and its counterpart with the trace as coming from the same numeration. This means that the resumptive pronoun itself would not be part of the numeration, but rather would be a spell-out of the trace, as in the account of Kayne (1981). The derivations of the (a) and (b) examples of (1) and (2) would therefore be the same up to the point where movement occurred leaving a trace. At this point the derivations would diverge, in that the (b) examples would involve the extra step of the trace spelling out as a resumptive pronoun.1 For reasons of economy, therefore, the derivation involving the resumptive pronoun would crash in cases like (1) where the trace is licit. In cases like (2), on the other hand, where a principle of grammar rules out the version with the trace, the derivation involving the resumptive pronoun is the only possible one and therefore goes through in spite of its costliness.2,3 In both the Minimalist framework and its predecessors, structures involving movement are constrained in two broad ways: either through a constraint on the derivation or through a constraint on representation. According to our account, resumptive pronouns are predicted to save only violations of conditions on representation; they should not affect the status of violations of conditions on the deriva1

Actually, given a copy theory of movement, the versions with a trace would involve a deletion rule, and in the versions with a resumptive pronoun, spell-out would occur after deletion. In any case, the resumptive pronoun versions would involve an extra step. 2 Languages in which resumptive pronouns alternate relatively freely with traces could be accounted for within this framework by positing resumptive pronouns as distinct lexical categories in these languages. Resumptive pronoun constructions would then be derived from a numeration that included a resumptive pronoun, rather than involving a spell-out of a trace. Since the trace and resumptive pronouns would result from two separate numerations, their derivations would not compete, and both could therefore yield grammatical outputs. Alternatively, the proposal of Sun˜er (1998) could be adopted, whereby resumptive pronouns are spell-outs in these types of languages as well. According to her account, the relative pronoun either moves or stays in situ in such languages. In the latter case, the relative pronoun spells out as a resumptive pronoun. This account is not incompatible with ours, and the two taken together actually could provide a uniform cross-linguistic account of resumptive pronouns. We would propose that the spell-out option for the movement case works as in the in situ case, but is optional and costly. Furthermore, languages would differ in whether the in situ option was available; it would not be in languages like English. For further discussion of languages with relatively free alternation between resumptive pronouns and traces, see Borer, 1984, Erteschik-Shir, 1992 and Shlonsky, 1992 for Hebrew; McDaniel, 1986 for Romani; and McCloskey, 1990 for Irish. Sells (1984) also includes discussion of Hebrew and Irish, as well as several other languages of this type. Note that Shlonsky (1992) argues that Hebrew is actually an English-type language with respect to resumptive pronouns. His account, like ours, posits the resumptive option as a last resort mechanism. However, he does not consider the issue of competing derivations, and so does not conclude that resumptive pronouns are trace spell-outs. 3 There are several problems with this account that we do not address here. Most importantly, any difference between traces and resumptive pronouns in English would have to be treated as a PF phenomenon. Dialects of English discussed by Sells, 1984 where resumptive pronouns cannot be used with quantificational heads would be problematic, since this difference in the distribution of resumptive pronouns and traces appears to involve LF.

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tion (i.e. on movement itself). In cases of the latter type, spelling out the trace as a resumptive pronoun should not help, since illicit movement would be involved either way. This might be seen as a problem for the description of the resumptive pronoun strategy as a general saving device. Turning to the analysis of specific cases, examples like (2a) are analyzed as involving (at least) a condition on movement in both the Minimalist framework and its predecessors. Descriptively, the problem in any account is the intermediate wh-phrase (here ‘when’) that comes between the top of the relative clause and the trace it relates to in the subject position of ‘met you’. Movement over the intermediate wh-phrase is ruled out.4 Cases like (2a), with subject extraction, are worse than their counterparts with object extraction, illustrated in (3). (3) ?That s the girl that I wonder when you met: 0

For this reason, subject extraction cases like (2a) are assumed to violate a further principle. This principle has been formulated in various analyses as a condition on representation that limits the distribution of traces in certain positions. For our purposes, the exact nature of the principle is not important; we will assume, as in other accounts, that it constrains representation.5 Returning now to resumptive pronouns, compare (3) (repeated here as (4a)) and its counterpart with a resumptive pronoun, (4b). (4a) ?That s the girl that I wonder when you met: 0

(4b) [judgment?] That s the girl that I wonder when you met her: 0

Our account predicts that, unlike the contrast exhibited by (2a) and (2b), sentences (4a) and (4b) should exhibit no difference in acceptability.6 This is because (4a) 4

In the pre-Minimalist Principles and Parameters framework, the relevant condition was Subjacency, which prevented wh-movement from skipping a clause (Chomsky, 1981). In the Minimalist Framework, the condition is a subcase of Economy known as ‘Shortest Attract’, according to which the wh-feature (here, the one at the top of the clause) needs to attract the closest wh-phrase, which would be the ‘wrong’ one (‘when’). 5 For our account to work, we have to assume further that the condition operates at the level of PF. Previous proposals for ruling out cases like (2a) include versions of the ‘Empty Category Principle’ (Chomsky, 1981), according to which traces have to be ‘properly governed’, and ‘relativized minimality’ (Rizzi, 1990). In all such accounts, the intermediate wh-phrase prevents the subject trace from being licensed. Richards (1997) develops an account that would make the extraction of the subject in cases like (2a) illicit both derivationally and representationally. He assumes wh-words have an existential component that either moves along with them or is left in their base position. He suggests that in the case of subjects, the existential component must remain in its base position. However, for apparently independent reasons, extraction of the existential component is forced in constructions with an intervening wh-word. These two requirements together would prevent the subject from extracting at all in such cases. 6 We do not assign any judgment to (4b), since our experiment is designed to investigate its status, in particular the prediction that (4b) should not be any better than (4a). Our account might actually predict that (4b) should be worse than (4a), since (4b) violates Economy both through Shortest Attract and through the extra step of spelling out the trace. However, the predictions concerning competing derivations are not clear when both derivations violate a grammatical principle. As will be seen below, the subjects in our experiment did not distinguish between cases like (4a) and (4b).

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violates only a condition on movement, which resumptive pronouns cannot ‘save’. Resumptive pronouns are predicted to improve the status of cases like (2a), which violate a condition on representation in addition to a condition on movement. In the literature on English resumptive pronouns, there is little discussion that explicitly contrasts cases like (2) with cases like (4). (Rizzi, 1990, p. 123) hints at a spell-out analysis, but only considers cases like (2). Kayne (1981) points out that a spell-out analysis of resumptive pronouns predicts that they would not repair movement violations, but he also limits discussion to cases like (2). Chomsky (1982) assumes that resumptive pronouns do repair movement violations in English, but the examples he discusses differ structurally from those in (4).7 Sun˜er (1998) proposes a spell-out account of resumptive pronouns, but explicitly limits the analysis to cases where languages allow resumptive pronouns and traces to alternate freely (see footnote 2). The reason that she does not attempt to extend her account to resumptive pronouns that serve a saving function is that, like Chomsky, she assumes that such resumptive pronouns do repair movement violations. Her English example consists of a pair of sentences similar structurally to (4) (‘the settlement that Caroline asked when we would get (it)’; her (3)). She stars the trace version and marks the resumptive pronoun version as grammatical. We informally asked several people about their intuitions on sentences like (2) and (4). While people seemed to perceive a clear contrast between (2a) and (2b), they were unsure about (4a) and (4b). In order to determine the facts for cases like (4), we conducted an experiment that included pairs like the ones in (2) and (4). Our prediction was that violations like (2a) should be significantly improved by replacing the trace with a resumptive pronoun, as in (2b). In contrast, the resumptive pronoun should not affect the status of simple movement violations like (4a).8

3. The experiment We constructed 24 sets of sentences, each set comprised of four sentences having structural properties parallel to the four examples in (2) and (4). Each of these sets of four sentences we termed a ‘token set’. We also constructed 48 filler sentences of 7

Chomsky’s examples are cases like (i) (his (8c)), where extraction would be from inside a clause in subject position. (i) the man who they think that if Mary marries him, then everyone will be happy. This case should probably not be ruled out by the same mechanisms that rule out (2a). We will not discuss such cases here. 8 Accounts based on other assumptions might of course make similar predictions. For example, Berwick and Weinberg (1986) and Pritchett (1992) analyzed the effect illustrated in (3) as resulting from the parser rather than from a principle of grammar. In these accounts, the sentence is structured in such a way that the ‘filler’ (here, the relative pronoun) cannot correctly find a ‘gap’ (trace). Depending on how this mechanism were extended to resumptive pronouns, an account could be developed that would predict that resumptive pronouns would not improve problems for the parser but would improve true ungrammaticalities like (2a). Erteschik-Shir (1992) argues, as we do, that (at least in cases like (3)) resumptive pronouns are spell-outs of traces. She proposes a processing account that predicts that resumptive pronouns will improve grammaticality only when they are sufficiently distant from the head of the relative clause. Depending on how her account were extended to cases like (2) (which she does not consider), it might also make predictions similar to ours.

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diverse types and built four counterbalanced lists of example sentences for informants to judge. Each counterbalanced list included six sentences of each of the four types represented by (2) and (4) and all 48 filler sentences. Each of the 24 token sets was represented on each counterbalanced list exactly once. The ordering of sentences on each counterbalanced list was determined by a controlled randomization procedure that insured that the various types of sentence were distributed uniformly across the entire list. There were two independent orderings of each of the four lists. Thus, the resulting experiment was a 4 × 2 × 2 design with factors Groups (four sentence lists), Structure Type (Movement Constraint vs. Representation Constraint) and Anaphora Type (Resumptive Pronoun vs. Trace), the latter two being within subjects. Data was collected from 36 linguistically naive adult native speakers of American English. Informants were asked to make intuitive assessments of the acceptability of each of the target sentences in one of the eight counterbalanced lists of target sentences (two orderings of each of four lists). Acceptability was reported by way of a scannable line-drawing procedure (see Cowart, 1997, pp. 74–75, for details). In brief, this procedure required subjects to report their judgments via a ten-point scale on a standard machine-readable response form. They were taught to regard each series of response values as a line. This imaginary line begins at the left edge of the series and each score value corresponds to a possible rightward end point for that line. A reference sentence presented at the outset of the judgment task was assigned a value of 5. Each response indicated how much better or worse than the reference sentence each sentence seemed. Subjects were free to use the full scale in making these assessments (from 0 to 9) or any narrower range if that felt appropriate.9 The principal results are summarized in Fig. 1.10 As predicted, there is no marked difference between the Resumptive Pronoun and Trace conditions for the violation on movement, but there is a difference for the violation on representation. The impression conveyed by Fig. 1 was supported by statistical analyses. By-subjects analyses showed a reliable interaction between the Structure Type variable (movement vs. representation) and Anaphora Type (resumptive pronouns vs. traces), F1(1,32) = 18.1, P , 0.001. There were also main effects for Structure Type, F1(1,32) = 6.04, P , 0.05, and Anaphora Type, F1(1,32) = 13.7, P , 0.001.11 By-sentences analyses did not show an interaction effect, F2(1,23) = 2.55, NS, but did show a main effect for Anaphora Type, F2(1,23) = 12.1, P , 0.01. However, 9 Cowart (1997) presents evidence suggesting that the scannable line-drawing procedure effectively mimics the relevant mathematical properties of standard line-drawing responses. A sample questionnaire with instructions for the response procedure is accessible on the following web site: http://www.usm.maine.edu/~lin. See Bard et al. (1996) for an application of standard scaling methods to sentence judgments. 10 Note that the baseline for the graph is set to a z-score of −1. This is an arbitrary value near to the acceptability values obtained in this data set for the least acceptable fillers. The baseline itself is of no significance whatever. The only significant features of the graph are the differences in judged acceptability it reflects. 11 Though there was no main effect for the Groups factor, there were interactions with this factor involving both Structure Type, F(3,32) = 2.96, P , 0.05, and Anaphora Type, F(3,32) = 3.56, P , 0.05.

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Fig. 1. The principal results of the experiment.

inspection of the sentence results showed that there were six of the 24 token sets where the expected effects over the two levels of the Anaphora Type factor did not emerge in the presence of representation violations. Though we offer no account of why the expected effects did not appear in these cases, it is clear that in the absence of such effects, these cases are irrelevant to the issues under examination here12,13. This is because our prediction concerns the relative status of sentences like (4a) and (4b), assuming the contrast in (2a) and (2b). Therefore we conducted a further bysentences analysis in which the six sentences referenced above were removed from 12 A complete list of the sentence materials used in the experiment (which identifies the six eccentric cases) is available on the USM Linguistics web site at: http://www.usm.maine.edu/~lin. 13 The six token sets that failed to show the expected effects were based on the following six verbspecifier combinations: overhear how, explain why, understand why, imagine how, hear how, ask where. Evidence reported in Cowart (1997, pp. 22–27) suggests that patterns for individual token sets tend to be quite stable.

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the analysis. In this analysis the crucial interaction between the Structure Type and Anaphora Type factors was significant, F2(1,17) = 11.7, P , 0.01. There was also a reliable main effect of Anaphora Type, F2(1,17) = 24.8, P , 0.001. Fig. 2 shows the relation between average responses to the three types of filler sentence and the average of responses to the experimental target sentences. Note that the experimental targets were generally rated worse than both the best and middle ranges of filler sentence. This is not surprising, given that all of the experimental sentences (in the 24 token sets) violate a principle of grammar, either just a condition on movement or also a condition on representation.

Fig. 2. The relation between average responses to the three types of filler sentence and the average of responses to the experimental target sentences.

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4. Conclusion These results provide evidence for a framework like Minimalism that incorporates competition among derivations. In particular, they support our account of English resumptive pronouns. As this account predicts, the resumptive pronouns seem to have repaired the violations on representation up to the level of the movement violations, but produced no similar advantage in the case of the movement violations. Assuming that our analysis of English resumptive pronouns is correct, this type of experimentation also provides a good diagnostic for determining whether ungrammaticality is due to a constraint on movement or representation in languages where resumptive pronouns work as they do in English. Furthermore, our findings are also crucial for frameworks that diverge from the grammatical analysis presented in this paper (e.g. non-Minimalist grammatical accounts or accounts that attribute the effects to language processing). Given our data, any account must make the following distinctions: (2a) (2a) (2a) (4a)

and (4a) are both perceived as degraded; is perceived of as worse than (4a); is improved by a resumptive pronoun (2b); is not improved by a resumptive pronoun (4b).

Finally, we emphasize the importance of the experimental methods we have applied here. All of the relevant sentence types are ungrammatical and the differences among them are relatively subtle. In these circumstances it would be very difficult to establish a clear picture of the empirical differences among the sentence types by exclusive resort to more conventional methods. Thus, our study demonstrates how experimental procedures can be used to make syntactic theory sensitive to more subtle details of relative acceptability. At the same time, our reliance on replicable objective procedures allows for fruitful debate on purely descriptive issues should there be questions about the particular patterns of acceptability we have uncovered. Acknowledgements This research was funded in part by a grant to the first author and Cecile McKee from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9421542). We are grateful to Judy Bernstein, Janet Fodor, Lyn Frazier, Sat Gupta, and Cecile McKee for their comments and suggestions at various points. We also thank our laboratory assistants: Karina Escajeda, Sadie Fowler, and Nancy Richards. Finally, the paper benefited from comments by Jacques Mehler and three anonymous reviewers. References Bard, E.G., Robertson, D., Sorace, A., 1996. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language 72 (1), 32–68.

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