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.
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.
Semantic analyses have been proposed which treat slifting as a kind of evidentiality.