Non-agreeing Resumptive Pronouns and Partial Copy Deletion

This paper investigates how Copy Deletion may apply partially through the lens of non-agreeing resumptive pronouns in two typologically unrelated languages Cantonese and Akan (Asante Twi). We show that there are two types of resumptive pronouns in both languages, agreeing and non-agreeing resumptive pronouns (RPs). Their morphological forms correlate with syntactic properties: non-agreeing RPs resemble movement traces, whereas agreeing RPs behave like base-generated pronouns. Assuming Late Insertion of Vocabulary Items in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993 et seq.), we propose that Copy Deletion applies partially to lower copies of movement chains, whose residue is realized as a default, non-agreeing RP (on a par with recent discoveries in van Urk 2018, Scott 2021, Georgi & Amaechi 2022). The findings not only shed light on how movement chains may be linearized (cf. Nunes 2004), but also suggests that resumption should receive a non-uniform treatment.