Intrusive resumptives as processing facilitators: an experimental investigation*
Andrea Beltrama and Ming Xiang
University of Chicago
1
Introduction
Resumptive pronouns (henceforth, RPs) can be defined as “pronouns which appear in
a position in which, under other circumstances, a gap would appear” (McCloskey,
2006, p. 26). In English, RPs are labeled as intrusive (Sells (1984)). On the one hand,
they are not licensed by the grammar, and are generally reported to be unacceptable
(as in (1-a)).
(1)
a. *This is the girl that John likes her. (RP)
b. This is the girl that John likes __. (Gap)
On the other hand, they have been claimed to improve processing, and generally
“sound better”, in cognitively taxing environments, such as island violations (in (2))
and licit dependencies with multiple embeddings (in (3)). However, since there is no
consensus on the exact characterization of such amelioration, we use the sign “>>” to
denote the yet-to-be specified meaning of “sounds better”. The examples reported here
are from (Erteschik-Shir (1992)).
(2)
a.?? I’d like to meet the linguist that Pat knows a psychologyst that works for
her. (RP in island)
b. * I’d like to meet the linguist that Pat knows a psychologyst that works
for __. (Gap in island)
(3)
a.?(?) This is the girl that Pat said that John thinks that yesterday his mother
had given some cakes to her. (complex dependency w/ RP)
b. * This is the girl that Pat gave some cakes to her (simple dependency RP)
This paper aims to cast light on the following question: Can RPs’ processing benefits
be reflected in large-scale experimental studies, and not just in linguists’ introspective
judgments? The debate has become particularly heated since a variety of
psycholinguistic work (Heestand et al. 2011, Alexopoulou and Keller 2007, see
Section 2 for further details) surprisingly revealed no improvement of resumption in
the environments above, casting doubt on the claim that resumption aids performance.
In this paper, we provide experimental evidence from Italian and English that RPs,
*Thanks to Jason Merchant, Caterina Donati, Carlo Checchetto, Karlos Arregi, Christina Kim, Lauren
Eby Clemens for their invaluable feedback.
Beltrama & Xiang
while inconsequential for acceptability, do make the sentence more comprehensible in
the presence of island violations. This finding supports the claim that intrusive
resumptives, though unable to repair the ungrammaticality of islands, can indeed
facilitate processing. The paper is divided as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical
and experimental literature on resumption. Section 3 discusses the experiments of the
current investigation. Section 4 provides a general discussion of the results. Section 5
concludes.
2. Intrusive resumptives: an unsolved puzzle
2.1 Processing devices
The phenomenon of intrusive resumption has garnered considerable interest in
theoretical and experimental syntax. A fairly popular proposal to account for the
asymmetry between the status of RPs in gaps and in islands/complex dependencies
has been to propose that RPs are processing devices (Kroch (1981), Prince (1990),
Erteschik-Shir (1992), Asudeh (2004)). In this view, intrusive RPs are not
grammatically licensed, but can be used as a last-resort strategy to improve the
production/comprehension of long distance dependencies in environments -- such as
islands and long dependencies -- where gaps would be particularly hard to process.
Concerning the mechanism whereby such effects come into being, Kroch (1981)
argues that resumption can be used to fix errors due to poor planning in oral discourse.
More specifically, whenever a wh-island violation occurs in production, the only way
to deliver a coherent message without disrupting fluency is to insert an RP. Prince
(1990) proposes a similar account. She observes that nearly 70% of spontaneously
produced RPs occur in islands and advocates a processing account for these
occurrences. Concerning the effect of RPs in long distance dependencies, ErteschikShir (1992) suggests that RPs are licensed whenever the filler is erased from shortterm memory due to the long time interval elapsed since the encounter with the
extracted element. Finally, Asudeh (2004) argues that RPs facilitate processing by
ensuring a locally well-formed segment (see General Discussion for further details).
2.2 The puzzle from the experimental literature
These accounts all face a major challenge. While the processing advantages granted
by RPs are consistently reflected in introspective data from linguists, resumptives in
large-scale experimental investigations have repeatedly turned out to be unacceptable
across the board, regardless of the environment in which they occur. This lack of
effect on acceptability, in turn, has led many authors to question the existence of any
processing advantage connected with RPs. We now turn to briefly review these
investigations.
In a two-experiment design, Ferreira and Swets (2005) first elicited target
sentences containing a resumptive pronoun inside a Wh-island, and then asked the
same subjects to rate their acceptability. Surprisingly, sentences containing RPs turned
out to be significantly worse than the control sentences, showing that resumption is
given low acceptability scores even by the same speakers that make use of it on the
production side. More recently, Alexopoulou and Keller (2007) compared gaps and
RPs in questions with islands and licit dependencies (grammatical controls) in
German and Greek, two languages that also have intrusive resumptives. For each
sentence, they also manipulated different levels of embedding. Under no circumstance
- islands included - did RPs turn out to be better more acceptable than gaps. Heestand
Intrusive resumptives as processing devices
et al. (2011) and Clemens et al. (2012) also conducted experimental investigations to
directly compare the acceptability of intrusive RPs and gaps in islands. They tested
RPs in a broader range of contexts - including declarative sentences and relative
clause and adjunct island violations - and made use of an online task, predicting that
listeners might consider RPs more acceptable than gaps when they have a limited
amount of time to process them. However, RPs never turned out to be more acceptable
than gaps. In a follow-up study, Clemens et al. (2012) replicated the design in an
offline task with auditorily presented stimuli. Once again, the presence of a
resumptive had no effect on acceptability. Finally, Han et al. (2012) tested for
rescuing effects with a magnitude estimation task, presenting the stimuli both in
written and auditory form. They tested both subject and object relative clauses with a
variety of island violations, including wh-islands, adjunct islands and NP-complex
islands. Consistent with the previous results, the acceptability of clauses containing
resumptive pronouns turned out to be uniformly low across conditions.
The only partial exception to these results comes from Hofmeister and Norcliffe
(2013), who tested RPs in sentences with different numbers of embeddings in English.
Consistent with the other studies, the authors found no effect of intrusive resumption
on acceptability. However, an effect on reading times was found in the region
immediately following the gap/RP: After resumptives, the reading times were
significantly lower than after a gap. This result has been taken to show that intrusive
resumption might still help sentence comprehension, even if it does not have an
impact on the acceptability of the sentence.
Two major puzzles emerge in light of these experimental results. First, intrusive
resumption seems to be exclusively associated with language production and shows
little effect on language comprehension, even for the very same speakers that made
use of the strategy in production. Second - with the exception of Hofmeister and
Norcliffe 2013 - the experimental investigations failed to find empirical support for
the claim that intrusive RPs affect the status of island violations or sentences with
multiple embeddings. Overall, the discrepancy between these findings and the
accounts in the theoretical literature is rather striking, and motivates further
investigation.
2.3 Methodological considerations
Although not methodologically identical, the studies discussed above share several
features which might suggest an explanation as to why the processing benefits of RPs
were not observable in the experiments. First, they all prompted acceptability
judgments. While most researchers have assumed that acceptability should naturally
increase whenever processing is facilitated (see General Discussion for further
details), it might well be the case that these two phenomena are not entirely
overlapping. In particular, devices like RPs are claimed to operate in environments
such as syntactic islands, which already have low acceptability (see General
Discussion for further details).
Second, regardless of whether the stimuli were in written or auditory form, the
target sentence was always presented in isolation, with no previous context
introducing it. However, if intrusive RPs really aid processing of an anaphoric
dependency, it is plausible that their effect could be stronger in combination with the
presence of some explicit context which, by making the antecedent more accessible,
facilitates the overall comprehension of the construction.
Beltrama & Xiang
Third, with the exception of Alexopoulou and Keller (2007), all these studies were
run on English, even though it is well known that intrusive resumption and islands are
attested in a very wide array of languages. In light of these considerations, further
investigations of RPs using a revised methodology are warranted.
3. Experiments
3.1.Experiment 1
Experiment 1 was designed to assess the effects of RPs in Italian. From a typological
perspective, Italian seems to pattern with English in not allowing resumption in
relative clauses. While RPs are generally excluded in grammatical configurations (as
in (4a)), they reportedly improve the status of sentences containing island violations
(see (4b) vs. (4c)), just as it has been claimed for English (examples and judgments
are from Belletti (2006)).
(4) a. *L‘uomo che lo arresteranno
se continua cosi
the.man that him(CL) they.will.arrest if he.goes.on like.that
‘The man that they will arrest if he goes on like that’ (RP in licit
dependency)
b. *L‘uomo che
temo
il pericolo che arresteranno __
the.man whom I.am.afraid.of the danger that they.will.arrest (Gap in
island)
‘The man whom I’m afraid of the danger that they will arrest’
c.
?(?) L‘uomo che temo
il pericolo che lo
arresteranno
the.man who I.am.afraid.of the danger that him(CL) they.will.arrest
‘The man whom I’m afraid of the danger that they will arrest him(?)’ (RP
in island)
However, contrary to English, Italian features grammatical resumption in some
unbounded dependencies other than relative clauses, such as the well-known case of
Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD, Cinque (1990), Belletti (2006)).1 As (5b) shows, the
resumptive clitic is required for the sentence to be grammatical.2
(5) a.
Mario lo
ho visto domenica
Mario him(clitic) I.have seen Sunday
‘Mario, I saw him on Sunday’
b. ?? Mario ho
visto __ domenica
Mario I.have seen __ Sunday
‘Mario I saw on Sunday’
1
This construction has been analyzed (Belletti (2006)) in terms of movement of a constituent to the
left periphery of the sentence, with a clitic RP that phonologically realizes the trace of the dislocated
constituent.
2
The only available reading of (5b) is one with contrastive focus on the dislocated constituent, such
as MARIO (and not Gianni), ho visto domenica, translated as ‘MARIO (and not Gianni) I saw on
Sunday’.
Intrusive resumptives as processing devices
In light of these facts, Italian constitutes an interesting test case for the effects of
intrusive RPs in relative clauses. On the one hand, given the independent presence of
resumption in the language, RPs might be more familiar across the board to Italian
speakers. As such, RPs could be more likely to generate a processing facilitation
effect that is robust enough to be detected in an experimental setting. On the other
hand, if intrusive RPs carry no benefits for processing, speakers of Italian should find
resumptives in islands and outside of islands equally bad.
Besides changing the language of investigation, we introduced some innovations
in the experimental design. First, we explicitly asked subjects to focus on the
comprehensibility of the target sentence, as opposed to its acceptability. If RPs
facilitate processing by helping with the construction of a coherent semantic
interpretation, we predict this measure to reflect the effect of RPs more accurately
than a standard acceptability task. Second, we presented the target sentence after
providing a context sentence that preceded it in a conversation-like fashion, as in the
example below. We predict that the additional context sentence confers an important
processing benefit. By setting up a real-world scenario for the interpretation of the
following sentence, it makes the antecedent of the target sentence more accessible,
limiting the cognitive effort required for the overall comprehension of the
construction.
(6)
Speaker 1: Yesterday there were riots in the street, and some people were
wounded by the police. Oh my, have you heard about this? (context sentence)
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. This is the boy that the cop who was leading the
operation arrested him! (target sentence)
Material
In a 2x2x2 factorial design we crossed the following three factors: a) Island; b)
Resumption; c) Embedding. For the Island factor, the critical sentence was either a
grammatical relative clause or an ungrammatical NP relative clause with an island
violation. For the Resumption factor, the critical sentence either contained a gap or a
resumptive. Concerning Embedding, the critical sentence was either presented with
two levels of embedding (2-level) or with three levels of embedding (3-level). Each
item consisted of two sentences. The first one described a context, and was the same
across all the conditions. The second sentence was framed as a natural continuation of
the first one and was manipulated according to the factors above. The list in (7)
reports the paradigm for an item.
(7)
Context sentence (same across conditions, spoken by Cecilia, a female
voice):
Ieri ci sono stati disordini per strada, e alcune persone sono rimaste ferite dalla
polizia.
Yesterday there have been riots for street, and some people were left wounded
by police.
“Yesterday there were riots in the street, and some people were wounded by
the police”
Beltrama & Xiang
Critical sentence (spoken by Pietro, a male voice):
Isl
NI
E
2/3
Res
Critical Sentence:
R/G
I
2/3
R/G
Questo è il ragazzo che (il giornale riporta che) il poliziotto che
guidava le operazioni {l’/__} ha picchiato.
This is the guy that (the newspaper reports that) the cop who led the
operations {him/__} has beaten.
“This is the guy that (the paper reports that) the cop who was leading
the operation beat {him/__} up” .
Questo è il ragazzo che (il giornale riporta che) il poliziotto
che{l’/__} picchiato deve essere sospeso.
This is the guy that (the newspaper reports that) the cop who led the
operations {him/__} has beaten.
“This is the guy that (the paper reports that) the cop who beat
{him/__} up must be suspended”.
64 sets of items were created. These items were distributed into multiple lists with
a Latin Square design, so that every subject was only tested on one particular
condition for a given item. We also created 40 additional fillers. These also consisted
of two sentences, with the first one providing a context and the second one
introducing a grammatical relative clause. Every subject was tested on 104 items total.
In order to increase the naturalness of the task, we presented the stimuli auditorily,
instead of in written form. All the items were first recorded by two native speakers of
Italian (a man, named Pietro, and a woman, named Cecilia) from the same region as
the subjects of the experiment.3 The context sentence was always read by the woman,
while the target sentence was read by the man. Six practice items were also recorded.
Participants
43 participants participated in the study. All subjects were between 18 and 40 years
old and were either high school or college graduates.
Procedure and statistical analysis
At the beginning of the experiment, subjects read on the monitor a paragraph
introducing the task of the experiment. They were told that they would listen to a
series of short conversations between a girl named Cecilia and a guy named Pietro.
Participants first listened to six practice trials, and then to the test items and the fillers
in a randomized order. After each trial, they were asked to assess how easy it was to
comprehend Pietro’s sentence (the one with the critical manipulations) by providing a
rating ranging from 1 (completely incomprehensible) to 7 (perfectly comprehensible).
3
The speakers were from the town of Bergamo, while the participants were from the town of
Sondrio. The two towns are located less than 50 miles apart from each other in the northern part of
Lombardia, a region in northern Italy. In this way, the participants would be dealing with an accent they
are already fully familiar with, minimizing the disruption potentially generated by encountering accents
associated with geographically distant areas of the country. In addition, to make the interaction as
natural as possible, we explicitly asked our two speakers not to conceal their accents, and to read the
sentences with a similar prosody to the one that they would use in an informal conversation with their
peers.
Intrusive resumptives as processing devices
They could only listen to one pass of each sentence and were allowed to take breaks in
between trials whenever they felt that this would be necessary.
Results
The comprehensibility judgments are plotted in Figure 1.
Figure 1: 1-7 comprehensibility judgments for Experiment 1. The Y-Axis indicates average values. The
X-Axis plots the conditions for the Island and Embedding factor. The solid line represents sentences
with a RP, whereas the dashed line represents sentences with a Gap. Error bars indicate standard errors.
We found a main effect of Island (by-subject F1(1,42) = 116.4, p < .0001; by-item
F2(1,63) = 20.0, p < .00001), a main effect of Resumption (by-subject F1(1,42) = 31.0,
p < .001; by-item F2(1,63) = 22.8, p < .00001) and a main effect of Embedding (bysubject F1(1,42) = 8.6, p <.01; by-item F2(1,63) = 9.6, p < .01). We also found
significant interaction effects between Resumption and Island (by-subject F1(1,42) =
61.4, p < .00001; by-item F2(1,63) = 51.8, p < .00001), Resumption and Embedding
(by-subject F1(1,42) = 40.1, p < .00001; by-item F2(1,63) = 30.9, p < .00001) and a
three way interaction between Resumption, Embedding and Island (by-subject
F1(1,42) = 15.3, p < .001; by-item F2(1,63) = 9.6, p < .001). Regarding the main effect
of Island, planned paired t-tests showed that all island conditions are worse than the
corresponding non-island conditions (all ps < .001). Concerning the other effects and
interaction, we report them separately.
Resumption
Planned paired t-tests showed that outside of islands, gaps turned out to be more
comprehensible than resumptive pronouns (t(42)= 5.6, p <.0001) with two embedding,
while they do not differ with three embeddings (t(42)=0.14, p > 0.5). In the presence
of islands, however, RPs received a higher comprehensibility score than gaps, both
with two (t(42)= 2.5, p <.01) and with three embeddings (t(42) = 4.0, p <.001).
Embedding
Beltrama & Xiang
Outside of islands, embedding decreased comprehensibility for gaps (t(42) = 5.9, p <
.0001) but not for RPs (t(42)=-0.3, p > .5). Inside islands, on the other hand,
embedding does not have any effect (all ps > 0.5) on either RPs or gaps.
Discussion of Experiment 1
The most salient result from Experiment 1 is that RPs in islands received higher
comprehensibility ratings than gaps in islands. This shows that intrusive RPs are
indeed helping comprehension in situations where a syntactic violation
overwhelmingly complicates the processing of the sentence. At the same time, the fact
that intrusive RPs can be advantageous from a processing standpoint does not mean
that they can completely rescue island violations, as shown by the fact that RPs in
islands received significantly lower scores than gaps outside of islands.
With respect to dependency length, gaps outside of islands significantly worsen in
comprehensibility going from 2 to 3 levels of embeddings, in line with the prediction
that the depth of the dependency complicates the processing of filler-gap
dependencies. Yet, under no circumstance are RPs rated higher than gaps in 3embedding dependencies, suggesting that resumption does not facilitate processing
when the challenge to the parser comes from the sheer length of the dependency.
Overall, these results provide evidence that in Italian resumptive pronouns behave
as processing facilitators in the presence of island violations. What remains to be
explained, however, is the reason why such an effect did not emerge in previous
investigations of English RPs. Two explanations are available. First, since Italian does
allow RPs in in constructions such as Clitic Left Dislocation, it is possible that the
presence of a resumptive structure in the grammar might lead Italian speakers to be
less biased against sentences with RPs across the board. This, in turn, might make it
easier for the experimental subjects to perceive the processing facilitation effect of
RPs in islands. Alternatively, it could be the case that the methodological changes
introduced in this study (context sentence, comprehensibility judgments) are primarily
responsible for the new results. If this is true, we predict that the processing benefits
of RPs should be observable in English too, provided that the same methodology is
used. In order to cast light on this issue, we performed the same task on English RPs
in Experiment 2.
3.2 Experiment 2
Materials, design and procedure
The design is the same as Experiment 1, as we manipulated Resumption (gap vs. RP),
Embedding (1 vs. 2) and Island (island vs. non-island) in relative clauses. However,
the task was carried out on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Stimuli were directly translated
from the Italian ones and presented in written form. Participants first read a context
sentence, then the target sentence, and finally were prompted to assess how
comprehensible the target sentence was on a 1 to 7 scale. 52 subjects participated in
the experiment. All of them had to confirm that they were native speakers of English
between 18 and 35 years old. In order to ensure that participants would be physically
located in the United States, only subjects with a US IP address were allowed to
participate.
Intrusive resumptives as processing devices
.
Results
The rating results are presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2: 1-7 comprehensibility judgments for Experiment 2. The Y-Axis indicates
average values. The X-Axis plots the conditions for the Island and Embedding factor.
The solid line stands for sentences with a RP, whereas the dashed line represents
sentences with a Gap. Error bars indicate standard errors.
We found a main effect of Island (by-subject F1(1,51) = 16.8, p < .0001; by-item
F2(1,63) = 16.5, p < .0001), a main effect of Embedding (by-subject F1(1,51) = 9.7, p
< .001; by-item F1(1,63) = 9.5, p < .001) and an interaction effect between
Resumption and Island (by-subject F1(1,51) = 18.3, p < .0001; by-item F2(1,63) =
45.2, p <.00001).
Resumption
Planned t-test comparison showed that, as in Exp. 1, RPs received a higher
comprehensibility score than gaps within islands, both with 2-level (t(51) = 3.9, p
<.001) and with 3-level embedding (t(51) = 2.4, p <.01). Outside of islands, however,
gaps turned out to be better than resumptive pronouns both with 2-embedding (t(51) =
3.7, p < .001) and with 3-embeddings (t(51) = 3.2, p < .01).
Embedding
Outside of islands, gaps were more comprehensible with 2-embedding than with 3embedding (t(51) = 3.9, p < .0001). No difference is observed for RPs (all ps > .5).
Discussion of Experiment 2
Experiment 2 shows that in English, resumption is also advantageous in terms of
comprehensibility. Within islands, sentences with resumptives received significantly
higher comprehensibility ratings than those with gaps. At the same time, outside of
islands RPs are always less comprehensible than gaps, suggesting that, as observed in
Experiment 1, the processing facilitation effect is limited to sentences that contain a
syntactic violation.
Beltrama & Xiang
Concerning embedding, while an increase in distance makes gaps harder to
comprehend, it does not have an effect on the comprehensibility of RPs. The lack of
effect of RPs in the presence of complex dependencies is surprising, and warrants
some discussion (see General Discussion).
Overall, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that the findings of Experiment 1
were due not to language-specific properties of Italian, but to more general properties
of intrusive resumption and the particular task/design we employed.
4
General discussion
The most significant finding from Experiment 1 and 2 is that the presence of a
resumptive pronoun can improve the comprehensibility of sentences with island
violations. On the one hand, this result supports the traditional linguistic intuition that
island violations with RPs somehow “sound better” than gaps. On the other hand, it
stands in stark contrast to the findings of previous experimental investigations, which
failed to find any effect of resumption in such contexts. In the General Discussion, we
first explore in further detail the exact sense in which resumptives aid processing, and
then discuss how the methodological innovations introduced in our experiments were
able to make RPs’ facilitation effect emerge in an experimental setting.
Concerning the mechanism by which resumptives facilitate comprehension, we
suggest two different possibilities. First, they contribute to the restoration of “local
coherence/well-formedness” in a situation in which global well-formedness is
compromised.4 This line of thought is consistent with the analysis of intrusive RPs in
Asudeh 2004, which separated global well-formedness from local well-formedness. In
his system, sentences with an island, regardless of whether they contain a gap or a RP,
are always ungrammatical, or globally ill-formed. Crucially, the presence of a
resumptive is able to at least restore the well-formedness of the local segment of
structure containing the RP, as the pronoun provides an argument that would
otherwise be perceived as missing. (8) provides a relevant example.5
(8) a. This is the guy that the cop who hit __ must be suspended.
GLOBALLY: * LOCALLY:*
b.
(Gap in island)
This is the guy that the cop who hit him must be suspended.
GLOBALLY: * LOCALLY: ✓
(RP in island)
Second, by perceptually signaling the tail of a long distance dependency, RPs can
explicitly cue people to retrieve the filler - which is still looking for a gap up until that
moment - and integrate it into the argument position that the pronoun occupies.
Crucially, the reason why resumptives can be effective in doing so has to do with the
fact, well-known in the literature, that RPs and gaps are associated with their
4
It is a well-known fact in the psycholinguistic literature that a coherent local parse can sometimes
affect performance independent of the global parse. For instance, see Tabor et al. (2004) on the
processing of reduced relative clauses.
5
Although Asudeh (2004) was not specific about whether the local coherence brought out by RPs
should improve comprehensibility, we assume that RPs, by virtue of restoring local well-formedness,
could at least facilitate the formation of some coherent pieces of semantic representations.
Intrusive resumptives as processing devices
antecedents via different mechanisms. On the one hand, gaps are variables that are
syntactically bound. As a consequence, whenever a filler-gap dependency is
syntactically ill-formed, as in the case of islands, the gap completely fails to be
connected to an antecedent, rendering the sentence incomprehensible. On the other
hand RPs are instead linked to their antecedent anaphorically (for different accounts,
see Prince 1990, Ertischik-Shir 1992, Alexopoulou and Keller 2007, Han et al. 2012;
also see Chao and Sells 1983 for an analysis of RPs as E-type pronouns). Under such
an account, RPs are interpreted by looking for a possible antecedent in previous
discourse, whose retrieval is not necessarily blocked by the presence of an island
boundary. Because of this, the resolution of the anaphor can be effectively facilitated,
despite the ungrammaticality of the construction.
We now proceed to discuss the role of the design. As described above, the current
study introduced two design features that were absent in previous experimental
investigations. One is a comprehensibility task, as opposed to an acceptability one.
The other is the presence of a context sentence before the target sentence. Concerning
the task, a crucial difference emerges between comprehensibility and acceptability
judgments. While there is consensus among linguists that acceptability is also
influenced by processing (see Miller and Chomsky 1963, Kluender 1992, Hofmeister
and Sag 2010, Staum Casasanto, Hofmeister and Sag 2010 among others),
acceptability systematically turned out not to be sensitive to the processing effect of
resumptives. We outline two observations that might indicate a promising starting
point to explain this discrepancy. First, alleviating processing does not always result in
increased acceptability. Staum Casasanto, Hofmeister and Sag (2011), for example,
found that repetition of a complementizer can speed up reading times at the embedded
sentence region, but nevertheless incurs an acceptability penalty with respect to its
counterpart with a single complementizer.6 Such a split between different behavioral
measures – reading times on the one hand and acceptability on the other one - closely
mirrors Hofmeister and Norcliffe’s (2013) findings on resumption, where resumptive
pronouns did speed up the reading times at the critical region while failing to improve
the acceptability of the sentence (see section 2.2). Second, the overall unacceptability
of the island constructions in which RPs are found might have also contributed to keep
acceptability at floor, regardless of the status of RPs. Introducing a comprehensibility
task, instead, shifts the attention of the speaker from judging the overall syntactic form
of the sentence to assessing whether and how easily a certain utterance is
interpretable. Because now the focus is exclusively on the message delivered by the
sentence, the semantic help provided by resumptives can finally be reflected in the
rating and be detected in an experimental setting.
Concerning context, numerous investigations in linguistics and psycholinguistics
have argued that successful resolution of an anaphoric expression is heavily dependent
on the contextual salience of the target antecedent (Ariel 1990, Erteschik Shir 1992,
Roberts 2010). We suggest that in our experiments the context sentence serves exactly
the function of boosting the salience of the relevant antecedent. First of all, the context
sets up a situation model for comprehenders, which assists the recall of the
antecedent-pronoun relationship. Second, contextual support also facilitates the
memory encoding of a discourse antecedent, boosting its degree of discourse
familiarity (see Ariel 1990, Roberts 2010). For example, given the test sentence that
we discussed above, the context sentence sets up a specific scenario (i.e., one
6
As the authors suggest, if the grammatical violation caused by the expression at stake (RPs, double
complementizer) is too strong, the judgments will nevertheless remain at floor, regardless of the
associated processing facilitation.
Beltrama & Xiang
involving riots, police, wounded people and so on), making the definite descriptions in
the target sentence (“the guy”, “the cop”) a natural continuation of discourse, with no
or very little accommodation work required. Without the context sentence, however,
the same definite descriptions, including the RPs’ antecedents, are completely new
discourse entities. This would demand a much heavier accommodation effort on the
part of the listener, which in turn might have contributed to overcome the effect of
RPs in experimental settings where the target sentence was presented in isolation.
Finally, a striking result is that both Italian and English sentences with RPs
showed no sensitivity to the embedding difference. While an exhaustive explanation
for his finding goes beyond the scope of this paper, we observe that the current design
is only comparing sentences with 3-level and 2-level embedding. Since these two
conditions only differ for one level of embedding, the facilitation effect of RPs may
not be detectable, as the benefit of RPs on comprensibility might become observable
only when there is a larger difference in embedding. Second, while longer sentences
with RPs were not rated better than shorter ones, the lack of improvement can also be
interpreted as an indirect effect of processing facilitation. At the very least, RPs
(without islands) prevented the sentence from getting worse (as the case of longer
sentences with gaps), neutralizing the negative effect of distance.7 While these
considerations could represent a promising departure point for future investigation on
the relationship between resumption and length, further experimental research needs
to be carried out to capture in a definitive manner this part of our results.
5.
Conclusions
In this study, we provided experimental evidence that resumption in Italian and
English does have a processing facilitation effect. While a number of theoretical and
methodological questions remain open, our results take an important step towards
reconciling the asymmetry between the claim that intrusive resumptive pronouns
facilitate processing and the apparent lack of processing facilitation effects emerging
in previous experimental research.
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