Johanna writes,

There are other very interesting questions. I used to collect sentences 
with relative clauses in which a resumptive (excess) pronoun appears, 
usually because the preceding material is so far away that the person 
forgets that they don't need the pronoun. For instance:

"Then there was that big fight that we had when we went camping up in 
the Sierras last summer that I don't even remember what it [excess 
pronoun] was about."

This is a made-up example, but if you listen, you will hear these all 
the time. I recorded examples I'd heard people say. Later I asked them 
if they would ever say such a sentence, and read their own sentence to 
them (which they had forgotten uttering by then). They would invariably 
reject the sentence. Chomskyans would call these performance errors 
which people have time to reject when they are reflecting on them. But 
many languages require the resumptive pronoun.
***************************************************************

        Resumptive pronouns are not limited to only speech. They are not uncommon in the writing of university first year composition students - at least in my experience. In an article in _The Journal of Basic Writing_ (2003, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 35-49), Bob Yates and I argued that usage of resumptive pronouns (and many other non-standard constructions)by novice/developing writers reflects innovative and principled language statagies for managing information flow, for instance, introducing and maintaining the discourse topic. Although the example that Johanna cites doesn't appear to have a resumptive pronoun, it is the kind of sentence that might be written by a novice/developing writer. (Johanna's example looks to me to be a straight topic-comment construction.) An example of a resumptive pronoun use cited in our paper is

        One of the young boys was my crush, who I had liked _him_ since second  grade.

Student writers very often do not self-correct these constructions, which we suggest is evidence that these constructions are not "errors" but are rather examples of principled language use. We claim that all speakers have access to these principles.  In other words, like Johanna, we argue that such constructions are not performance errors, but we do so from a _Chomskyan_ perspective. I am not sure that even early generative grammar ever made claims about the kinds of discursive constructions we are considering but Chomsky himself currently attributes movement of sentence constituents to the need to maintain coherent information flow.

                                        Jim Kenkel
                                        Eastern Kentucky University

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