$$Events$$

Dec. 25, 2018
12:00
-13:30

Building 74, Room 516

​​​Sluicing is ellipsis in a question, leaving only a wh-phrase overt (Ross 1969), e.g.: Sally called someone, but I don't know who. Recent work on the licensing conditions of sluicing has converged on the need for a semantic approach to ellipsis licensing, where the sluiced question must be congruent to an issue or a Question under Discussion raised in the discourse (Q-equivalence; e.g. Ginzburg and Sag, 2000; AnderBois, 2011; Barros, 2014; Weir, 2014; Kotek and Barros, 2018). 

​We highlight several challenges to Q-equivalence, and argue instead for a return to a focus-based approach (Rooth 1992a; Romero 1998; Fox 2000; Merchant 2001). We develop a proposal similar to, but improving on Merchant 2001, where sluicing is possible provided that the antecedent and sluice have the same focus-theoretic propositional content. Under such an approach, antecedents are importantly not responsible for raising any particular issue/question themselves. We furthermore provide a generalized account going beyond sluicing to explain cases of VP-ellipsis. Finally, we entertain the idea that the theory of ellipsis licensing should be integrated into a general theory of redundancy reduction (Rooth 1992, Tancredi 1992) — in particular, that the semantic condition on identity in ellipsis is the same as the condition on deaccenting.