A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. This focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation.
In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as follows:
- it + conjugated form of to be + X + subordinate clause
where it is a cleft pronoun and X is usually a noun phrase (although it can also be a prepositional phrase, and in some cases an adjectival or adverbial phrase). The focus is on X, or else on the subordinate clause or some element of it. For example:
- It's Joey (whom) we're looking for.
- It's money that I love.
- It was from John that she heard the news.
- It was meeting Jim that really started me off on this new line of work.
Read more about Cleft Sentence: Types, Structural Issues, Information Structure
Famous quotes containing the words cleft and/or sentence:
“But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English Theatre so much as a Ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody Shirt. A Spectre has very often saved a Play, though he has done nothing but stalked across the Stage, or rose through a Cleft of it, and sunk again without speaking one Word.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicality ... sentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all—stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)