In linguistics, slifting is a grammatical construction in which the embedded clause of a propositional attitude, speech report, or emotive is preposed. For instance the English sentence "Nick is a great singer, Sara claims" is the slifted variant of "Sarah claims Nick is a great singer". The concept was first identified and named by Haj Ross in 1973. Slifting is more restricted than other kinds of preposing. Sentences involving slifting are often referred to as "slifting parentheticals" since the content of the slifted clause must be at-issue. For instance, the example above is most naturally understood as asserting that Nick is a great singer while parenthetically acknowledging Sara as the source of this information. The examples below show that this interpretation is strong enough to produce infelicity when a preceding question establishes a context where the wrong proposition is at-issue.
Additionally, not all embedding predicates allow slifting.
Slifted clauses also cannot have an overt complementizer.
Moreover, interrogative instances of slifting show subject-auxiliary inversion.
Ross analyzed slifting as the result of a movement rule. However, many subsequent researchers have argued that slifting is fundamentally different from true preposing and that the slifted clause may not be an embedded clause at all. Semantic analyses have been proposed which treat slifting as a kind of evidentiality.
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