Resumptive Pronouns Simply Put, Resumptive

Resumptive Pronouns

Simply put, resumptive pronouns are those syntactical elements that refer back to the primary antecedent or, in some cases, another previously presented element within the same sentence. Uncommon in English except in certain cases where a complex series of clauses leads to a deep embedding of the original antecedent (the referent of the resumptive pronoun), many other languages contain resumptive pronouns as a means of clarifying or reaffirming the subject or object referred to by the pronoun. In the sentence, "This is the girl who, when the storm is coming, she hides," she is a resumptive pronoun, referring back to "the girl," the subject of the sentence. In English, "This is the girl who, when the storm is coming, hides" is also correct, and in many other cases a resumptive pronoun would be entirely incorrect ("This is the girl who she hides when the storm comes" is clearly incorrect when "she" refers to the same individual as "the girl" and thus is resumptive; "This is the girl who hides when the storm comes" -- the same clause less the resumptive pronoun -- would be the proper way to construct this in English). In other languages, however, the resumptive pronoun is not only allowable but required in many more circumstances. This can cause certain problems for foreign (non-native) learners of English.

There is some controversy as to whether or not primary languages serve as models that lead to errors when it comes to resumptive pronouns; though this definitely occurs for other types of errors, researchers have observed that resumptive pronoun errors are committed by small children that are native learners of languages that do not use resumptive pronouns (e.g., a young native English speaker might say, "This is the girl who she hides when the storm comes"), and also by foreign language learners in ways that do not match the usage of resumptive pronouns in their native languages. That is, while Cantonese (for example) uses resumptive pronouns in more constructions than English, native Cantonese speakers that are learning English have been observed to make resumptive pronoun errors that do not correspond to the resumptive pronoun constructions of Cantonese. Both of these areas of data -- the fact that young native speakers of languages without extensive resumptive pronoun use make resumptive pronoun errors, and the fact that non-native speakers make resumptive pronoun errors that do not correspond with their native language's use of resumptive pronouns -- suggest that resumptive pronouns and resumptive pronoun errors are caused by innate linguistic constructs and reasoning.