ABSTRACT
A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun that appears in a position that might otherwise be associated with a gap. In a diverse range of languages, resumptive pronouns are natural or even obligatory: Irish (McCloskey 1990, 2006), Lebanese Arabic (Aoun and Choueiri 1996; Aoun, Choueiri, and Hornstein 2001), Hebrew (Borer 1984; Asudeh 2002), and Swedish (Engdahl 1985). This chapter investigates the properties of resumption in Romani, a critically understudied Indic language spoken by Roma populations across Europe. I revisit the data on Romani resumptive pronouns originally explored in McDaniel (1986), interpolated with new data derived from fieldwork with native speakers of Romani. I review Sichel’s (2014) proposal for Hebrew, in which she claims that when a pronoun and a gap compete to realize the bottommost copy in a movement chain, a gap (the least specified form) will emerge whenever possible and resumption will emerge otherwise. I show that Sichel’s approach is broadly compatible with the basic facts in Romani, even where those facts contrast with what is found in Hebrew. I then address an interesting puzzle that emerges when we consider wh-scope marking within relative clauses; I explore ways we might approach this puzzle, as well as point to what additional research might be needed to better understand this marginal structure in this marginal (or indeed marginalized) language.
