The Resumptive Pronoun Strategy: Insight from Tiv
Keywords:
Tiv, Resumptive pronouns, Base-generation, Merge and Move, Minimalism, Syntax/SemanticsAbstract
Resumptive pronouns (RPs) constitute part of the universal linguistic features obtainable in natural languages. Parametric variations, however, occur in the strategies employed to achieve resumption in different languages. Current treatment of resumptive pronouns hinges on movement analysis and non-movement analysis. The thrust of this paper is to examine resumption in Tiv, with a view to establishing the Tiv strategy. This paper explains the motivation for the resumption strategy and its behaviour in the language. It examines both the early and current analyses of RPs in the literature, with a view to positioning its analysis. The paper further sketches the behaviour of RPs in interrogative, topicalized and relativized constructions. Re olativization remains the most
productive strategy in Tiv and many other languages.The treatment of RPs in this paper is in the light of Asudeh, (2004), McCloskey, (2005), Uwalaka (1995), among others. This study shows that resumption in Tiv cannot be pinned down to either the movement or base generation strategy; it vacillates. Although Tiv RPs utilize the base generation more than there are instances of Merge and Move, the identity effects are considered more important than the locality effects. The theoretical framework for this paper is The Minimalist Program by Chomsky (1993). The corpus for this paper is elicited utterances by adult native speakers and intuition from one of the authors who is a native.
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