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[ Editorial board meeting , 10 : 04 a . m . ] ANYA : Someone has removed the final paragraph . JOEL : Who ? ANYA : I don't know . MIRA : From which version ? ANYA : The one circulated last night . LUCA : By whom ? ANYA : Again , I don't know . The exchange lasted less than twenty seconds , but it contained the grammatical pattern that would dominate the rest of the meeting . " Who ? " " By whom ? " Both are reduced wh - clauses . The full questions could be reconstructed as : " Who removed the final paragraph ? " " By whom was the final paragraph removed ? " English often omits the repeated material when it can be recovered from context . In this particular construction , known as sluicing , a wh - word or wh - phrase survives while the rest of the clause is left unspoken . The board did not set out to discuss grammar . It was meeting to decide whether a controversial investigative essay was ready for publication . Yet the transcript became a useful record of how naturally sluicing appears in real editorial conversation . [ 10 : 09 a . m . ] JOEL : The legal team has objected to something in section four . MIRA : What ? JOEL : They haven't said yet . The first sentence introduces an indefinite element : " something . " The follow - up question asks for its identity : " What [ has the legal team objected to in section four ] ? " The bracketed material is understood rather than pronounced . A full repetition would be possible : " What has the legal team objected to in section four ? " But in conversation it would sound unnecessarily heavy . The context already supplies the missing clause . This is one reason sluicing is so common : it compresses shared information and leaves only the element that remains unknown . [ 10 : 14 a . m . ] LUCA : One of the sources wants a sentence changed . ANYA : Which one ? LUCA : I'm checking . " Which one ? " is not always analysed as the clearest textbook case of sluicing because the surviving phrase contains more than a bare wh - word , but functionally it illustrates the same economy : the board understands the larger question without hearing it repeated . The editors were not merely shortening sentences . They were managing information . What everyone already knew was omitted . What remained uncertain stayed audible . That relationship becomes clearer when an antecedent is explicit . " Someone called the newsroom , but I don't know who . " The meaning is : " Someone called the newsroom , but I don't know who called the newsroom . " The second clause contains an embedded question . Only " who " is pronounced ; the rest is recoverable . Similarly : " They changed one quotation , but nobody remembers which one . " " We need to meet one of the lawyers , though I'm not sure which . " " The author withdrew a claim , but I can't remember why . " In each case , the wh - expression survives because it carries the unresolved information . The meeting became more interesting when the missing material was not perfectly straightforward . [ 10 : 21 a . m . ] MIRA : The author says someone misunderstood the source . JOEL : Who ? MIRA : The author doesn't say . LUCA : Who misunderstood the source , or who was misunderstood ? That was a genuine ambiguity . Sluicing depends on recoverability , but recoverability does not guarantee a single interpretation . Context normally tells listeners what the omitted clause must contain . When the antecedent supports more than one structure , the reduced question can become unclear .
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