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In syntax, sluicing is a type of ellipsis that occurs in both direct and indirect interrogative clauses. The ellipsis is introduced by a wh-expression, whereby in most cases, everything except the wh-expression is elided from the clause. Sluicing has been studied in detail in recent years and is therefore a relatively well understood type of ellipsis.^[1] Sluicing occurs in many languages.^[2]

Sluicing is illustrated with the following examples. In each case, an embedded question is understood though only a question word or phrase is pronounced. (The intended interpretations of the question-denoting elliptical clause are given in parentheses; parts of these are anaphoric to the boldface material in the antecedent.)

Phoebe ate something, but she doesn't know what. (=what she ate)

Jon doesn't like the lentils, but he doesn't know why. (=why he doesn't like the lentils)

Someone has eaten the soup. Unfortunately, I don't know who. (=who has eaten the soup)

Sluicing in these examples occurs in indirect questions. It is also frequent in direct questions across speakers, e.g.

Somebody is coming for dinner tonight. - Who? (=Who is coming for dinner tonight)?

They put something in the mailbox. - What? (=What did they put in the mailbox)?

The examples of sluicing above have the sluiced material following its antecedent. This material can also precede its antecedent, e.g.

I don't know why, but the pictures have been moved. (=why the pictures have been moved)

When and how is unclear, but somebody should say something. (=when and how somebody should say something)

The following example from Merchant, 2003 displays sluicing in Danish:

Peter har snakket med en eller anden, men jeg ved ikke hvem.

Peter has talked with one or another but I know not who.

Peter has talked with someone, but I don't know who. (=who Peter has talked with)

The following example from Abels, 2018 displays sluicing in German:

Hans will jemanden helfen, aber ich weiß nicht wem.

Hans wants someone help but I know not who.

Hans wants to help someone, but I don't know who.

Interrogative phrases in languages with morphological case-marking show the case appropriate to the understood verb (as Ross 1969 and Merchant 2001 document), illustrated here with the German verb "schmeicheln" (to flatter), which governs the dative case on its object.

Er hat jemandem geschmeichelt, aber ich weiß nicht, wem.

he has someone.DAT flattered but I know not who.DAT

"He flattered someone, but I don't know who."

Languages that forbid preposition-stranding in question formation also forbid it in sluicing (Merchant 2001), as in the following example from German:

Er hat mit jemandem gesprochen, aber ich weiß nicht, *(mit) wem.

he has with someone spoken but I know not with who

"He spoke with someone, but I don't know (with) who."

Much research has been done to determine if sluicing can allow for preposition-stranding in a non-preposition-stranding language. Stjepanović, 2008 conducted research on whether this is possible in the non-preposition-stranding language, Serbo-Croatian. She concluded that there is not enough evidence to contradict the initial claim made by Ross. However, she did find that a preposition may be lost or removed from a sentence under sluicing in Serbo-Croatian. More research is to be conducted to confirm the official cause of this preposition-loss. An example of the preposition-loss shown by Stjepanović, 2008 is displayed below;

Petar je sakrio igradku ispod jedne stolice i pored jednog zida, ali ne znam (ispod) koje stolice i (pored) kojeg zida.

Gloss Petar is hidden toy under one chair.GEN and beside one wall. gen but not I.know under which chair.GEN and beside which wall.GEN 4

Translation Petar hid the toy under a chair and beside a wall, but I don't know which chair and which wall.'

In some languages, sluicing can leave behind more than one wh-phrase (multiple remnant sluicing):

Someone wants to eat something. ?I wish I knew who what. (=who wants to eat what)

?Something is causing someone big problems, although it's not clear what who. (=what is causing who big problems)

Sentences like these are considered acceptable in languages like German, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, and others, although in English, their acceptability seems marginal (but see Bolinger 1978, Merchant 2001, and Richards 2010 for examples). Lasnik 2014 discusses the fact that the wh-phrase remnants in multiple sluicing must be clausemates:

*Someone told me that something broke, but I don't remember who what. (≠who told me that what broke)

Sluicing has garnered considerable attention because it appears, as Ross 1969 first discussed, to allow wh-fronting to violate the island conditions he discovered:

They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don't remember which one. (=*which one they want to hire someone who speaks)

Sluicing allows a sentence containing an island to hold it's meaning and remain grammatical. As mentioned by Abels, 2018, there is an ongoing debate on whether this can happen in all situations or if it is island dependent.

A biography of one of the Marx brothers will be published later this year, guess which (of the Marx brothers) [a biography of which of the Marx brothers] will be published later this year.

A biography of on of the Marx brothers will be published later this year, guess which.

The first example is ungrammatical because the island prevents us from moving anything out of the subject constituent (shown in square brackets). The second example is saved through sluicing as the island is sluiced and the meaning can be inferred from the context of the sentence, therefore maintaining the meaning and remaining grammatical.

Ross (1969) is the first examination of sluicing; he argued that sluicing involves regular wh-fronting followed by deletion of the sister constituent of the wh-phrase. This analysis has been expanded in greater detail in Merchant (2001), the most comprehensive treatise on sluicing to date. Such analyses account directly for the case and preposition-stranding facts, but have difficulty accounting for the absence of island effects. A second kind of analysis is represented by Ginzburg and Sag (2000) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), both of which present nonstructural analyses of ellipsis, and do not posit unpronounced elliptical material. Such analyses must be supplemented in some way to account for the case facts; nonstructural analyses have not been shown to be able to handle the cross-linguistic distribution of preposition-stranding under sluicing, which appears to track preposition-stranding possibilities in non-elliptical questions. Yet another account of sluicing builds on the catena unit; the elided material is a catena.^[3]

Only the catena-based approach handles multiple sluicing without further elaboration. The structural movement analysis must rely on some other type of movement to evacuate the noninitial wh-phrase from the ellipsis site; proposals for this additional movement include extraposition or shifting.^[4] The nonstructural analysis must add phrase-structure rules to allow an interrogative clause to consist of multiple wh-phrases. The catena-based approach, however, does not account for the locality facts; since catenae can span multiple clauses, the fact that multiply-sluiced wh-phrases must be clausemates is a mystery.

• Abels, K. 2018. Movement and Islands. The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, 16, 1-43.
• Bolinger, Dwight. 1978. Asking more than one thing at a time. In Henry Hiz (ed.), Questions, 107-150. Reidel: Dordrecht.
• Chiu, Liching. 2007. A Focus Movement Account on Multiple Sluicing in Mandarin Chinese Nanzan Linguistics. Special Issue Vol. 1. P.23-31.
• Chung, Sandra, William Ladusaw, and James McCloskey. 1995. Sluicing and Logical Form. Natural Language Semantics 3, 239-282.
• Culicover, Peter and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
• Ginzburg, Jonathan and Ivan Sag. 2000. Interrogative Investigations. CSLI Publications: Stanford, Calif.
• Lasnik, Howard. 2014. Multiple sluicing in English? Syntax 17, 1, 1-20.
• Merchant, Jason. 2001. The syntax of silence: Sluicing, identity, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
• Osborne, Timothy, Michael Putnam, and Thomas Groß 2013. Catenae: Introducing a novel unit of syntactic analysis. Syntax 15, 4, 354-396.
• Osborne, Timothy (to appear). Dependency grammar. In The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis. Oxford University Press.
• Richards, Norvin. 2010. Uttering trees. MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass.
• Ross, John R. 1969. Guess who? in CLS 5: Papers from the fifth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, eds. Robert Binnick, Alice Davison, Georgia Green, and Jerry Morgan, 252–286. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Linguistic Society.
• Stjepanović, S. 2008. P-stranding under Sluicing in a Non-P-Stranding Language? Linguistic Inquiry, 39(1), 179-190.

• Ellipsis (linguistics)
• Verb phrase ellipsis