A resumptive pronoun is a personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption (such as an embedded clause, series of adjectives, or a wh-island), as in This is the girli that whenever it rains shei cries.
Resumptive pronouns have been described as "ways of salvaging a sentence that a speaker has started without realizing that it is impossible or at least difficult to finish it grammatically".[1] An English speaker might use a resumptive pronoun in order to prevent violations of syntactic constraints.[2]
In many languages, resumptive pronouns are necessary for a sentence to be grammatical, and they help in interpretation and performance of particular syntactic conditions.[3]