Sluicing: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

This book of new research by leading experts 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.

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.