Bare resumptives

This paper shows that some languages have ‘bare resumptives’, that is, resumptive pronouns lacking the usual ö-features. It then shows that bare resumptives must be local to their binder (do not violate islands) unlike ö-featured resumptives. This behaviour is explained by a theory which takes pronouns in general to be projections of a category which denotes a variable. Variables must be bound before interpretation, which, within a phase based model, means before Merge of the next phase head. I argue that D serves this purpose for ö-featured resumptives, while C does for bare resumptives. The locality effects follow, and the system as a whole extends to bound pronouns and to locality conditions on the ‘fake indexicals’ recently discussed in the semantics literature (e.g. Kratzer 2009).