A Crosslinguistic, Experimental Study of Resumptive Pronouns and that-Trace Effects

We present two magnitude estimation experiments on the role of resumptive pronouns in subject extraction in English and German. In the theoretical literature, resumptives have been claimed to remedy effects of island violations, but our results show that this is not the case. Furthermore, our data also con-firm the existence of a that-trace effect for both languages, con-trary to theoretical claims that this effect is not present in Ger-man. On a methodological level, our study demonstrates the importance of controlled experiments for obtaining theoreti-cally crucial linguistic judgments, and the potential of the mag-nitude estimation paradigm for crosslinguistic comparisons