The effect of linear distance on the processing of resumptive relatives:

Danielle Novais Uchôa, Erica dos Santos Rodrigues, Cilene Rodrigues –LAPAL/INCog

a study with Brazilian Portuguese speakers

Resumptive pronouns have been investigated by both theoretical andexperimental a pproaches. Languages vary in relation to the acceptability of resumptive pronouns (McCloskey 2006). In English, resumptives are analyzed as last resort strategies used to save derivations in island constructions (Hornstein, 2001; 2007). Grammatical resumptives are found in Hebrew, Swedish, Irish, certain varieties of Arabic, etc. (Chao & Sells 1983; Engdahl 1985; Shlonsky

1992; McCloskey 2006). In Brazilian Portuguese, resumptive pronouns are licenced in the context of relative clauses, but data from corpora (Tarallo, 1988; Lessa de Oliveira, 2008, 2009; Mollica, 2003), acceptability judgments (Kenedy, 2007) and experimental studies (Miranda, 2008; Grolla & Augusto, 2014) have shown that their use is limited. According to psycholinguistics literature, the occurrence of resumptive pronouns has been associated to lss planned situations (Ferreira & Swets, 2005; Corrêa et al., 2018) and contexts in which the recovery of the antecedent is costly (Ariel, 1999). In this presentation, we concentrate on the role of linear distance in the processing of resumptive relatives vs. standard and chopped relatives. Two self-paced listening experiments were conducted. In the 1 st experiment, we contrasted subject and object relative clauses in standard and resumptive versions, and in the 2 nd one we contrasted oblique and genitive relatives in resumptive vs. standard and chopped versions. In both experiments, syntactic position was a between factor. The results suggest that resumptive pronouns seem to make processing faster in high-demanding situations: when there is an intervening element and when distance makes the antecedent recovery difficult.