Yale holds workshop on sluicing

July 7, 2017

Postdoc Matt Barros, Lecturer Hadas Kotek, and Professor Bob Frank organized a workshop on sluicing. Sluicing is a phenomenon in which a sentence contains a wh-clause that is elided, or left silent, except for the wh-word. For example, sentence 1 below contains the clause who Mary spoke with. This sentence can be rephrased as sentence 2, which is identical to sentence 1, except that Mary spoke with is left silent.

  1. Mary spoke with a boy, but I don’t know who Mary spoke with.
  2. Mary spoke with a boy, but I don’t know who.

Experts on sluicing from various institutions came to Yale to discuss issues regarding sluicing such as the identity of the elided material, the relationship between sluicing and wh-movement, the effects of sluicing on locality constraints, and sluicing of clauses with multiple wh-words. The speakers are listed below.

The workshop was held on April 22 at Yale’s Dunham Laboratory. The program and abstracts are available on the conference website. A video recording in four parts is available on our department’s Facebook page (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

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