Syn/Sem Talk – Anand Abraham

“Sluicing as Discourse Anaphora”

Sluicing is a phenomenon where a *wh*-phrase is used to stand for the meaning of a whole question. Sluicing is traditionally analyzed as a variety of ellipsis (Chung et al. 1995, Merchant 2001), but significant mismatches are possible between the antecedent of a sluice and the structure that is posited in the ellipsis site. Here I take a different route and argue that sluicing is not ellipsis but discourse anaphora. What a sluice does is ask a question about the identity of a discourse referent. This approach avoids issues of specifying an identity condition, and I argue that it fits the semantic facts better too.