English Resumptive Pronouns Are More Common Where Gaps Are Less Acceptable

Ā-dependencies occur when an argument appears clause-peripherally, dislocated from its canonical base position, as in relative clauses (1a). The displaced argument is a filler (italicized in (1) and throughout), and the base position is typically realized as a gap—that is, a syntactic category that is not pronounced (represented by an underscore throughout). A subset of languages that employ the filler-gap strategy, including Arabic (Aoun and...