Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project

The Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project is a research group associated with the Department of Linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Coordinated by Pranav Anand and Jim McCloskey, the group includes faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the department. Our funding between 2013 and 2015 was provided by the the Institute for Humanities Research at UCSC. From June 2015 our principal funding source is the National Science Foundation, Award No. 1451819: The Implicit Content of Sluicing with our co-PI Dan Hardt.

The focus of the group is on ellipsis (the reduction of meaning to silence), a pervasive and mysterious aspect of the grammars of human languages. Our goal is to create and make available to researchers of every kind a set of rich data resources centered on ellipsis phenomena.

Our principal current project is to create and make available a large, richly annotated, and freely accessible database centered on the ellipsis-type known as `sluicing'. You can have a look at some of our sample annotations (from the annotator's perspective) here.

Our pioneer team of annotators was Rachelle Boyson, Jasmine Embry, Jack Haskins, and Lily Ng.

The second annotation team (2015-16) consisted of: Brooks Blair, Mansi Desai, Zach Lebowski, Lyndsey Olsen , Reuben Raff, Lydia Werthen , and Anissa Zaitsu. Chelsea Miller and Rachelle Boyson acted as coordinators and lead annotators.

The third team (2016--2017) included: Jacob Chemnick, Charlotte Daciolas, Mansi Desai, Anny Huang, Serene Tseng, Lydia Werthen , and Anissa Zaitsu.

Finally in 2017--2018 three lead annotators -- Mansi Desai, Lydia Werthen , and Anissa Zaitsu -- undertook a review, updating and conciliation of all annotations, an effort which was completed on June 15th, 2018.

Contact us here.

Download some of our materials here.