Sluicing

This book considers the phenomenon of sluicing. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material (as in Someone saw her, but I don't know who _.). Elliptical constructions of this type are now known to occur widely in the world's languages in some form or another, and create interesting problems for linguistic analysis, involving complex interactions between syntax, semantics and morphology, as well as prosody. The present volume brings together new research by leading experts who analyse sluicing constructions in English, Dutch, Frisian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Malagasy, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Bengali. The book expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar. In addition to the nine chapters dedicated to specific languages, the volume features an introductory chapter and Haj Ross's original (1969) landmark paper on sluicing.

Jason Merchant is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on ellipsis, including on sluicing, swiping, fragment answers, verb phrase ellipsis, antecedent-contained ellipsis, comparative ellipsis, and nominal ellipsis. His other interests are in case, split ergativity, locality, islands, agreement, and topics in the syntax-semantics interface. His primary language areas are in Germanic, Greek, and Romance. He studied at Yale, Tubingen, Utrecht, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he received his Ph.D. in 1999.

Andrew Simpson is Professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. His research is focused on the comparative syntax of East, Southeast and South Asian languages, in particular Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Bangla and Hindi. He is the author of Wh-Movement and the Theory of Feature Checking (John Benjamins), the editor of Language and National Identity in Asia and Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford University Press), and joint general editor of the Journal of East Asian Linguistics. He has published articles in Linguistic Inquiry, Language, Lingua, the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Studies in Language, Language and Linguistics, and the Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society.