Syntactic Interaction in Resumption

This paper explores the feasability of a novel movement approach to resumption in relativization contexts. Previous analyses which often rely on base generation to create both the RP and operator independently suffer from certain look-ahead and backtracking issues which run counter to Minimalist tenets. The basic claim here is that a novel movement (or stranding) approach to grammatical resumption is able to derive crosslinguistic distribution patterns of gaps/resumptives via the interaction of primitive, independently necessary operations. Within a Minimalist, phase-based framework, Agree, Move, and Merge are ordered in transparent ways to account for gaps or resumptives in certain extraction positions.