Yale holds workshop on sluicing
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.
- Mary spoke with a boy, but I don’t know who Mary spoke with.
- 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.
- Matt Barros (Yale University)
- Hadas Kotek (Yale University)
- Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers University)
- Bob Frank (Yale University)
- Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)
- Brooke Larson (University of Iowa)
- Troy Messick (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
- Emily Manetta (University of Vermont)
- Kyle Johnson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
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).