Resumptive Pronouns in Children's Grammar

Abstract

Kang, Bosook. 2006. Resumptive pronuns in children's grammar. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 14(2), 197-216. This study investigates English learning children's resumptive errors in relative clauses. The purpose of the study is to determine whether their resumptives exhibit the properties of true- resumptives possible in other adult grammars such as Hebrew. The experimental results reveal that some children allow resumptives in extractable contexts and also accept them with bound variable readings, indicating that their resumptives have the same syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation as those of true resumptives. Based on these data, I argue that some English learning children initially hypothesize the true-resumptive grammar and speculate along the line of Rizzi (2005) that the misseting of the resumptive parameter may be due to a processing overload.