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Abstract

Resumptive pronouns ( RP  s) in Hebrew are productively used in relative clauses and other Ā-dependencies. In accusative and embedded nominative positions, they alternate with gaps, but in oblique and genitive positions they are obligatory. An influential proposal takes the former type of RP  s to be base-generated and the latter type to be a residue of movement (“realizational RP  s”); concomitantly, only the latter type is expected to display reconstruction effects. I argue that there are no realizational RP  s in Hebrew— all RP  s are base-generated alike. Furthermore, all RP  s in the language display full reconstruction effects, even inside islands, a pattern observed across a range of Arabic dialects as well. Reconstruction is thus dissociated from movement and is instead explained by NP -ellipsis inside the resumptive DP , now seen as an E-type pronoun. We discuss a range of syntactic and semantic discrepancies between RP  s and gaps, which are inexplicable on the realizational view, but receive a natural account on the E-type analysis of RP  s.