The logic of pronominal resumption by Ash Asudeh (review)

The book provides a novel analysis of pronominal resumption centred around the syntax–semantics interface and semantic composition. The cornerstones of the proposed account are McCloskey’s Generalization and the Resource Sensitivity Hypothesis (henceforth, RSH), which posits that a natural language is resource-sensitive, i.e., the meaning of each part of a linguistic expression is used only once in the computation of the meaning of the expression.

The book consists of six parts. Part I introduces background information concerning the phenomenon of resumption, as well as the syntactic and semantic theory adopted in the book. Part II focuses on the main theoretical contribution of the book, i.e., the RSH and the Resource Management Theory of Resumption (henceforth, RMTR). Parts III and IV deal with syntactically active and syntactically inactive resumptives, respectively, while Part V concentrates on processor resumptives and copy pronouns in copy raising. Part VI contains the appendices.

Part I is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 is an Introduction. In chapter 2, resumption is examined in light of McCloskey’s Generalization, which identifies resumptive pronouns as ordinary pronouns. Relying on data from Irish and Hebrew, Asudeh argues that both their form and interpretation favour a treatment as ordinary pronouns. He also examines the distribution of resumptive pronouns cross-linguistically, noting that Irish allows resumptive pronouns in every type of unbounded dependency, including relative clauses, wh-questions, clefts, and comparatives. Other languages (e.g., Hebrew, Welsh, and Palestinian Arabic), however, host resumptives in a more limited number of contexts. Asudeh also discusses the behaviour of resumptive pronouns and gaps in islands, weak crossover, reconstruction, across-the-board extraction, and form-identity effects, and concludes that only in some languages, such as Swedish and Vata, do resumptives pattern with gaps, whereas in others, for instance in Irish, they are different from gaps. This distinction leads Asudeh to posit two types of resumptive pronouns, namely syntactically inactive resumptives (henceforth, SIRs), found, for example, in Swedish and Vata, and syntactically active resumptives (henceforth, SARs), present, for instance, in Irish. The third type of resumptives Asudeh distinguishes are the so-called processor resumptives (or intrusive pronouns), attested, for example, in English. The fourth and final type of resumption that Asudeh sets out to analyse are copy pronouns found in copy raising.

Chapters 3 and 4 briefly review the basic tenets of Lexical Functional Grammar and Glue Semantics, based on Kaplan and Bresnan (1982), Dalrymple et al. (1999), Dalrymple (2001), and Crouch and van Genabith (1999), among others.

Part II contains two chapters, the first of which centres around the formal theory behind the RSH, while the other elaborates on the RMTR. In chapter 5, Asudeh argues that resumptive pronouns constitute surplus resources for semantic composition, i.e., their meaning constructors are not consumed by the relative operator and therefore they need to be associated with some other consumer if the RSH is to be maintained. The consumers of pronominal resources, or licensors of resumptive pronouns, correspond to manager resources, and therefore the theory that Asudeh proposes is called the Resource Management Theory of Resumption. The RMTR, described in chapter 6, highlights the fact that the two types of resumptive pronouns, i.e., inactive—syntactically similar to gaps—and active—syntactically different from gaps—are licensed by means of the same semantic composition mechanism based on manager resources. Likewise, resumptive pronouns in unbounded dependencies and copy pronouns in copy raising both instantiate resumption and are licensed by manager resources. The difference between the latter two classes lies in the choice of licensor of the resumptive pronoun only. Consequently, resumption is viewed as a problem of semantic composition. Manager resources for resumptive pronouns frequently correspond to complementizers. The role of the manager resource is to remove the resumptive pronoun from semantic composition without affecting the rest of the composition. The surplus meaning resource provided by the resumptive pronoun is thus taken care of and the resulting structure is perfectly licit.

Part III, devoted to SARs, consists of two chapters. Chapter...