linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

, slifting is a grammatical construction in which the

embedded clause A subordinate clause, dependent clause, subclause, or embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as th ...

of a

propositional attitude A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g. "believed") governing an embedded "that" clause, for example, 'Sally believed that she had won ...

, speech report, or emotive is preposed. For instance the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

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 John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was ...

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. # Q: Why is Freedia not here?
A: She quit, Sara told me. (slifting) # Q: What did Sara tell you?
A: # She quit, Sara told me. (slifting) # Q: Why is Freedia not here?
A: Sara told me she quit. (non-slifting) # Q: What did Sara tell you?
A: Sara told me she quit. (non-slifting) Additionally, not all embedding predicates allow slifting. # #She quit, Sara doubts. # Jame'll be here next week, she emailed me. Slifted clauses also cannot have an overt

complementizer In linguistics (especially generative grammar), complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a s ...

. # Q: Why is Freedia not here?
A: # That she quit, Sara claims. (slifting) # That she quit, Sara told me. That she won the lottery, I only found out later. (non-slifting preoposing) Moreover,

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is ...

instances of slifting show subject-auxiliary inversion. # Will Freedia report our company's crimes to ESMA, Sara wondered. (slifting) # Whether Freedia will report our company's crimes to ESMA, I don't know. (non-slifting) 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 Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

analyses have been proposed which treat slifting as a kind of

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

Notes

Semantics Pragmatics Syntactic entities Syntactic transformation {{syntax-stub

See also

Notes