Types
English is very rich in cleft constructions. Below are examples of other types of clefts found in English, though the list is not exhaustive (see Lambrecht 2001 for a comprehensive survey, Collins 1991 for an in-depth analysis of it-clefts and wh-clefts in English, and Calude 2009 for an investigation of clefts in spoken English).
- It-cleft: It is Jaime for whom we are looking.
- Wh-cleft: What he wanted to buy was a Fiat.
- Reversed wh-cleft/Pseudo-cleft: A Fiat is what he wanted to buy.
- All-cleft: All he wanted to buy was a Fiat.
- Inferential cleft It is not that he loves her. It's just that he has a way with her that is different.
- There-cleft: And then there's a new house he wanted to build.
- If-because cleft: If he wants to be an actor it's because he wants to be famous.
Unfortunately, traditional accounts of cleft structures classify these according to the elements involved following English-centric analyses (such as wh-words, the pronoun it, the quantifier all, and so on). This makes it difficult to conduct cross-linguistic investigations of clefts since these elements do not exist in other languages, which has led to a proposal for a revision of existing cleft taxonomy (see Calude 2009).
However, not all languages are so rich in cleft types as English, and some employ other means for focusing specific constituents, such as topicalization, word order changes, focusing particles and so on (see Miller 1996). Cleftability in Language (2009) by Cheng Luo presents a cross-linguistic discussion of cleftability.
Read more about this topic: Cleft Sentence
Famous quotes containing the word types:
“... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting—the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)