Grammatical resumption and dependency processing in Southern Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

Abstract This study investigates the sensitivity of grammatical resumption to islands in wh-interrogative and relative clause dependencies in Southern Jordanian Arabic (JA). An offline acceptability judgment task and an eye-tracking reading experiment were conducted. The results reveal that resumption in southern JA exhibits sensitivity to strong islands, such as adjunct islands, in both dependencies. The findings also suggest that the southern JA parser posits a resumptive pronoun (RP) inside islands that allow resumption. However, the parser does not predict an RP inside islands that disallow resumption. Furthermore, quantitative data show that wh-interrogative and relative clause dependencies pattern similarly in their sensitivity to islands.