ORGANIZERS:

Luka Crnič, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ivy Sichel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The research on resumptive pronouns has seen many interesting developments since Edit Doron's pioneering paper on resumptive pronouns in Hebrew in the early eighties. Resumptive pronouns are those pronouns which occur in relative clauses in many languages, including Hebrew, as in, for example, "ha-ish she-pagashti oto" (= "the man who I met him", which in English, of course, would be rendered without "him", the resumptive pronoun). The paper by Edit Doron was the first study to point out that these pronouns can affect meaning, an idea which was further developed by subsequent studies on pronouns in Hebrew and in other languages. At the same time, there have been a number of key developments in the fields of Syntax and Semantics which are directly relevant to our understanding of the grammar and interpretation of resumptive pronouns. The goal of our conference is to examine how the accumulating empirical findings on the interpretation of resumptive pronouns can be integrated into contemporary theoretical frameworks.

The conference is a unique opportunity to bring together linguists from all over the world who are engaged in related questions in different languages, and from different perspectives, and the conference will feature lectures on resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, English, Jordanian Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Swiss German, Welsh, Turkish, Greek, Italian, and French.