In the spring of 1969, Haj Ross presented “Guess who?” at the fifth annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society and published it in the resulting proceedings. The spring of 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the presentation and publication of this landmark paper, which opened the door to a wide range of important discoveries on the interface between phonological, syntactic, and semantic systems of grammar. The construction that Ross named, sluicing, sits at the intersection of two of the most important areas of grammatical theory in the past half-century: the theory of movement, in particular, the locality of unbounded dependencies and islands to movement, and the theory of ellipsis, where there is linguistic meaning without the expected form.

We  are  pleased  to  invite  submissions  for  twenty-minute  talks  (plus  ten  minutes  of discussion)  to  a  conference  in  celebration  of  this  landmark  work  in  linguistic  theory,  “Sluicing and ellipsis at 50”, to be held at the  University  of  Chicago  on  Friday  and  Saturday,  April  12-13,  2019.  The  conference  is  dedicated  to  an  exploration  of  the  wide  range  of  phenomena  that  have  been  investigated  under  the  rubric  of  sluicing,  but  also  more  generally  formal  approaches  to  ellipsis,  including  questions  of  the  potential  mechanisms  of  ellipsis  (deletion,  copying,  proforms  or  other  anaphoric  devices).  

The  conference  will  feature  two  plenary  lectures,  one  each  by  Haj  Ross  and  Howard  Lasnik,  as  well  as  a  range  of  additional  invited  talks  by  a  range  of  prominent  scholars  who  have  worked  on  ellipsis  and  sluicing  in  the  intervening  decades,  in  addition  to  a  number  of  papers  selected  by  abstract  submission. 

Plenary Lecturers:

• Haj Ross (UNorth Texas)
• Howard Lasnik (UMaryland-College Park)

Invited Speakers:

• Klaus Abels (UCL)  -to be confirmed-
• Matt Barros (Yale)
• Vera Gribanova (Stanford)
• Kyle Johnson (UMass Amherst)
• Anikó Lipták (U of Leiden)
• Jim McCloskey (UC-Santa Cruz)
• Ingo Reich (U Saarland)
• Andrés Saab (U of Buenos Aires)
• Gary Thoms (NYU)
• Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern)
• Susanne Winkler (Tübingen)

Submission Guidelines

1. Submit your abstract(s) in PDF format with filename PaperTitle.pdf (e.g., Sluicing_and_Ellipsis_in_English.pdf).
2. Include paper title in the abstract.
3. Limit abstracts to two letter-sized or A4 pages in length, inclusive of data and references. Use one-inch margins and a font size no smaller than 11 point. Incorporate data into the main text of the abstract, not on a separate page.
4. Anonymize submissions by not including author name(s) in the abstract or filename. If necessary, remove author name(s) from the document properties of the PDF file.
5. Use the Easychair platform for the submission of abstracts.
6. Restrict submissions to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.

Venue

The conference will be held at The University of Chicago.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to sluicing.50@gmail.com