On the universality of intrusive resumption: Evidence from Chamorro and Palauan

The literature on resumptive pronouns (RPs) has given rise to a rich taxonomy of the phenomenon. Despite the fact that RPs invariably have the morphosyntactic form of ordinary pronouns, they vary widely in distribution and function. In some languages, RPs are grammatically licensed; depending on the language and the syntactic context, they might or might not realize traces, compete with gaps, exhibit reconstruction effects, and so on. In other languages, notably English, RPs are ‘intrusive’ (Sells 1984 ). Kroch ( 1981 ), Asudeh ( 2004 ), Morgan and Wagers ( 2018 ), and others have proposed that intrusive RPs in English are ungrammatical products of the performance system—productions that satisfy local well-formedness but not global well-formedness. This account predicts that in every language, regardless of whether it has grammatically licensed RPs, intrusive RPs could also be found. Here we test this prediction against evidence from Chamorro and Palauan. Previous accounts have maintained that Chamorro does not have RPs and Palauan has only RPs. On the basis of corpus and elicited production data from Chamorro, and a re-examination of the Palauan evidence, we argue that both languages have grammatically licensed RPs, as well as intrusive RPs. Their grammatically licensed RPs differ in form and distribution. At least in Chamorro, the distribution of intrusive RPs produced is similar to that in English.