2 - Resumptive Relatives

Summary

In this chapter, I begin by presenting an overview of existing research on resumptive relatives in §2.2, and identifying key hypotheses raised by this research. I then go on to test these hypotheses in relation to a set of empirical data on resumptive relatives taken mainly from my recordings of live, unscripted broadcasts on British radio and TV stations, but also including some internet-sourced data. These are supplemented by further data from a corpus of resumptive relatives collected by Tony Kroch at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, which Tony kindly made available to me: I shall refer to his data as the Kroch corpus. In §2.3, I use my own data to test whether (as widely claimed) resumptives in English are only used to relativise constituents in inaccessible positions. I subsequently look at what my data tell us about aspects of the derivation of resumptive relatives (e.g. whether or not they involve movement), examining the syntax of relativisers in §2.4, pronominal resumptives in §2.5, and nominal resumptives in §2.6. I then go on to explore potential parallels between resumptive relatives and topic clauses in §2.7. I conclude with a summary of the main findings of this chapter in §2.8.