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The Santa Cruz Sluicing Data Set

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Pranav Anand ,
Daniel Hardt  and
James McCloskey
Pranav Anand*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Daniel Hardt*
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
James McCloskey*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
[panand@ucsc.edu]
[dha.msc@cbs.dk]
[mcclosk@ucsc.edu]
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Abstract

This report describes a new research resource: a searchable database of 4,700 naturally occurring instances of sluicing in English, annotated so as to shed light on the questions that have shaped research on ellipsis since the 1960s. The paper describes the data set and how it can be obtained, how it was constructed, how it is organized, and how it can be queried. It also highlights some initial empirical findings, first describing general characteristics of the data, then focusing more closely on issues concerning antecedents and possible mismatches between antecedents and ellipsis sites.

Keywords

ellipsissluicingannotationcorpusEnglish

Information

Type
Research Report
Information
Language , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. e68 - e88
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The research reported here was supported by funding from the Academic Senate of UC Santa Cruz, from The Humanities Institute of UC Santa Cruz, and from the National Science Foundation via Award Number 1451819: ‘The Implicit Content of Sluicing’ (PI Pranav Anand, co-PIs James McCloskey and Daniel Hardt). The project would have been impossible without the perceptiveness and commitment of our undergraduate annotators: Brooks Blair, Jacob Chemnick, Charlotte Daciolas, Jasmine Embry, Jack Haskins, Anny Huang, Zach Lebowski, Lily Ng, Lyndsey Olsen, Reuben Raff, and Serene Tseng. Particularly important contributions were made by our lead annotators—Rachelle Boyson, Mansi Desai, Chelsea Miller, Lydia Werthen, and Anissa Zaitsu. Our graduate student research assistants also made crucial contributions: Kelsey Kraus, Margaret Kroll, Deniz Rudin, and Bern Samko. Beyond the project itself, many colleagues have provided advice and support that we appreciate—Sandy Chung, Vera Gribanova, Kyle Johnson, Jason Merchant, and Tim Stowell in particular. We are also grateful to two referees and to the editorial team at Language (Lisa Travis and John Beavers) for a review process that was critical, constructive, and helpful.

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