When Resumption determines Reconstruction
Résumé
This paper challenges the traditional minimalist view on A' reconstruction as an exclusive consequence of A' movement (see Chomsky (1995), Sauerland (1998), Aoun et al (2001) among others). The authors introduce novel data from French and Jordanian Arabic showing that reconstruction can occur, through the presence of resumption, within domains that exclude A' movement, i.e., strong islands. They further argue that reconstruction of an XP signals the presence of a copy of that XP rather than movement of that copy, hence allowing for two kinds of reconstruction: reconstruction via movement, and reconstruction via very specific cases of ellipsis. More precisely, they account for unexpected cases of reconstruction within strong islands through NP deletion's analysis of resumptive pronouns (hence generalizing Elbourne (2001)). They finally show how this analysis also nicely accounts for the fact that reconstruction is sensitive to the type of binding condition (positive versus negative conditions) and the type of resumption (weak versus strong resumption).