Assessing the Relationship of Grammatical Weight of Relative Clause and Presence or Absence of Resumptive Pronoun

A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent. The use of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses appears to be governed by structural complexity in grammar and usage. Hawkins’s (2004) Efficiency and complexity in grammars predicts a parallel effect in usage: when the grammar permits the option of either resumptive pronoun or gap, resumptive pronouns should be used more often as structural complexity increases. By the results of four experiments including processing assessment, production task, an acceptability judgement task and listening experiment, the relation of relative clauses’ weight and the presence of a resumptive pronoun with an objective antecedent or lack of it is verified. The hypothesis was that with the increase of grammatical weight of relative clause, the need for a resumptive pronoun will be more. Finally, the results of four experiments are analyzed by SPSS software. The results which were based on the hypothesis, were not meaningful. It means that the presence or absence of resumptive pronoun in different grammatical weights does not make a meaningful difference. It means Persian speakers use lots of resumptive pronouns without attention to grammatical weights of relative clause.