Resumptive relatives and LF chains

This paper discusses intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic variation in the distribution of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. Three types of resumptive pronouns are distinguished: optional, obligatory, and intrusive. It is argued that in all these cases, the resumptive pronoun is not an independent lexical item merged in the argument position, but it is the spell-out of the referential index on the tail of the chain. Furthermore, it is shown that in the case of optional resumptive pronouns this spell-out is sensitive to the nature of the chain link at LF (non-specific, specific or definite): this leads to the hypothesis that Spell-out applies to the LF representation. A syntactic implementation of specificity is explored in terms of Rizzi's (1997, 2000) split Comp system. The empirical evidence supports a three-way classification of A' extractions, independently proposed by Postal (1994, 1998), and by Grosu & Landman (1998) for relative clauses.