Sluistingstiming

Sluistingstiming is a term used in linguistics to describe the study of temporal aspects of sluicing-like ellipsis in spoken discourse. Sluicing refers to a construction in which part of a clause is omitted but recoverable from context, typically after a wh-word as in “Someone arrived, but I don’t know who.” Sluistingstiming concentrates on when the ellipsed material is interpreted, the speed of this reconstruction, and its alignment with prosodic cues and turn-taking.

The approach combines discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and prosody. Key questions include the latency between the antecedent and the ellipsis, how sentence complexity affects processing time, and how intonation, rhythm, and pausing guide listeners to reconstruct the missing material. Data are typically drawn from spoken corpora, acceptability and processing experiments, and real-time annotations of audio or video recordings.

In practice, sluistingstiming informs theories of incremental interpretation and has applications in natural language processing and speech synthesis, where timing signals can influence perceived coherence and response planning. It also sheds light on how listeners coordinate comprehension in conversation, particularly in rapid or noisy dialogue.

See also: sluicing, ellipsis, discourse analysis, prosody, psycholinguistics, real-time language processing.