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.

This conference in celebration of this landmark work in linguistic theory, “Sluicing and ellipsis at 50”, will be held at the University of Chicago on Friday and Saturday, April 12-13, 2019.

Workshop website: https://voices.uchicago.edu/sluicingat50/

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)

Call for papers:

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).

Presenters will be given 20 minutes for presentation followed by a 10-minute question period.

Abstract Guidelines:

Submit your abstract(s) in PDF format with filename PaperTitle.pdf (e.g., Sluicing_and_Ellipsis_in_English.pdf).
Include paper title in the abstract.
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.
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.
Use the Easychair platform for the submission of abstracts: submission link here.
Restrict submissions to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: November 15, 2018 by 11:59 PM CST
Notification: December 15, 2018
Final Program: December 22, 2018

For questions, please contact us at sluicing.50@gmail.com