[Ads-l] Sluicing

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Oct 23 15:10:51 UTC 2017


> On Oct 23, 2017, at 10:57 AM, Jim Parish <jparish at SIUE.EDU> wrote:
> 
> Laurence Horn wrote:
>> *Just checked my disintegrating copy of CLS 5, Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (I wuz dere, Charley), and sure enough in the first paragraph of “Guess Who”, Ross explains that he will refer to the rule that converts (the structure underlying) “Somebody just left—guess who just left” into (the structure immediately underlying) “Somebody just left—guess who” as Sluicing, but he doesn’t say why. (Yes, another sluice; the sluiced clause doesn’t have to be overt.)
> 
> Even with the clue of the title, I got garden-pathed - tried to figure out what "left-guessing" was.
> 
My bad, and/or my mailer’s autocorrect’s bad.  Ross’s original was actually

Somebody just left -- guess who.

(with spacing after “left” and before “guess” and two hyphens rather than an em- or en-dash).

LH

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