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Cleft sentence
View on WikipediaA 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. In spoken language, 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 the cleft constituent, 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.
Furthermore, one might also describe a cleft sentence as inverted. That is to say, it has its dependent clause in front of the main clause. So, rather than (for example):
- We didn't meet her until we arrived at the hotel.
the cleft would be:
- It wasn't until we arrived at the hotel that (or when) we met her.
Types
[edit]
English is very rich in cleft constructions. Below are examples of some 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
[edit]In English, it-clefts consist of the pronoun it, followed by a form of the verb to be, a cleft constituent, and a relativizer, which introduces a relative clause that is attributed to the cleft phrase.[1] It-clefts introduce two meanings parts: (1) a presupposition that the property in the clause following the complementiser holds of some entity; and (ii) an assertion that this property holds of the entity denoted by the cleft constituent.[1]
- English it-cleft: It was John that Mary saw.[2]
Wh-cleft/Pseudo-cleft
[edit]In English, pseudo-clefts consist of an interrogative clause in the subject position, followed by a form of the verb be, followed by the focused element that appears at the end of the sentence.[3] The prototypical pseudo-cleft construction uses what, while other wh-words like who, where etc. and their pro-form equivalents like thing, one, place etc. are used less frequently.[4] Pseudo-clefts are tools for presenting and highlighting new information, serving as the building blocks of a coherent discourse progression, and a rhetorical toolkit to construct an authorial stance, being a grammatical resource for making evaluative meaning.[vague][5]
- English wh-cleft/pseudo-cleft: What Mary bought was a first edition.[3]
Reversed wh-cleft/Inverted pseudo-cleft
[edit]In English, an inverted pseudo-cleft consists of the identical structure to pseudoclefting, however, the two strings around the verb be are inverted.[3] The focus element has been brought to the front of the sentence, and the clause is sentence final.[6]
- English reversed wh-cleft/inverted pseudo-cleft:
All-cleft
[edit]In English, all-cleft sentences are related to pseudo-clefts in which they are constructed with the subject of the sentence embedded in the phrase and expressed with the verb "to be".[8] Where pseudo-clefts begin with a wh-phrase (what, where, who), all-clefts begin with the use of the word "all".[8]
- English all-cleft:
Inferential cleft
[edit]In English, inferential clefts involve a subordinate clause that is embedded as a complement of the verb "to be", and the sentence begins with the subject "it".[10] Oftentimes, an inferential cleft will include an adverb such as only, simply or just.[10] While they are analyzed in written text, data on inferential clefts are often found in spoken language and act as a subordinate clause of the subject they are inferring.[11]
- English inferential cleft:
Inferential Cleft sentence: "It was just that it was raining."
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- It is not that he loves her. It's just that he has a way with her that is different.[9]
- It was just that it was raining.[10]
There-cleft
[edit]Looking at existential sentences, in all languages, they are understood to belong to a grammatically distinct construction, which is utilized to express existential positions. Cleft-sentences in English contain existential sentences that have a dummy there as a subject, be as a main verb, and an NP in the post-verbal complement position. To elaborate, dummy there can be distinguished as an adverbial, pronoun, and subject. Likewise, be can be distinguished as a main verb, and may contain other intransitive verbs such as come, remain, exist, arise, and stand. Lastly, post-verbal NP depends on the discourse of the entity or entities that refer to the novel information it is expressing.[12]
- English dummy there-cleft:
- English be there-cleft: There comes a stage when a player should move on.[12]
- English post-verbal NP there-cleft: There was George Talbot and there was Ted.[12]
- English there-cleft: And then there's a new house he wanted to build.[13]
If-because cleft
[edit]![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2024) |
- English if-because cleft: If he wants to be an actor it's because he wants to be famous.[9]
Other languages
[edit]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 all 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.
Structural issues
[edit]The role of the cleft pronoun (it in the case of English) is controversial, and some believe it to be referential,[14] while others treat it as a dummy pronoun or empty element.[15] The former analysis has come to be termed the "expletive" view, whereas the latter is referred to as the "extraposition" approach. Hedberg (2002) proposes a hybrid approach, combining ideas from both takes on the status of the cleft pronoun. She shows that it can have a range of scopes (from semantically void to full reference) depending on the context in which it is used.
Similarly controversial is the status of the subordinate clause, often termed the "cleft clause". While most would agree that the cleft clause in wh-clefts can be analysed as some kind of relative clause (free or fused or headless), there is disagreement as to the exact nature of the relative. Traditionally, the wh-word in a cleft such as What you need is a good holiday, pertaining to the relative What you need, is understood to be the first constituent of the relative clause, and to function as its head.
Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978) posit a different analysis. They suggest that the relative clause is headed (rather than headless), with wh-word being located outside the clause proper and functioning as its head. Miller (1996) also endorses this approach, citing cross-linguistic evidence that the wh-word functions as indefinite deictics.
The cleft clause debate gets more complex with it-clefts, where researchers struggle to even agree as to the type of clause that is involved: the traditionalists claim it to be a relative clause (Huddleston and Pullum 2002), while others reject this on the basis of a lack of noun phrase antecedent (Quirk et al. 1985, Sornicola 1988, Miller 1999), as exemplified below:
- It was because he was ill that we decided to return.
- It was in September that he first found out about it.
- It was with great reluctance that Maria accepted the invitation.
The last element of a cleft is the cleft constituent, which typically corresponds to the focus. As mentioned earlier, the focused part of a cleft is typically a noun phrase, but may in fact, turn up to be just about anything:[16]
- Prepositional phrase: It was on foot that he went there.
- Adverbial phrase: It was greedily and speedily that Homer Simpson drank his beer.
- Non-finite clause: It is to address a far-reaching problem that Oxfam is launching this campaign.
- Gerund: It could be going home early or slacking off at work that the boss reacted to.
- Adverbial clause: It was because she was so lonely all the time that she decided to move out.
Finally, the issue pertaining to cleft sentences intersects the distinction between canonical and inverse copular sententences as proposed by Andrea Moro in Moro (1997) and many others. A telling minimal pair is the Italian equivalent of
- what I don't like is strange canonical copular sentence
- what I don't like is prime numbers inverse copular sentence
The first is a canonical copular sentence, namely one where the subject is a DP on the left; the second one is an inverse copular sentence, namely one where the subject is the DP in situ and the predicate has been raised to the position canonically reserved to subject. A direct proof of this is given in language like Italian, for example, where the copula always agrees with the subject. In the inverse copula sentence it agrees with prime numbers showing the underlying structure. Similar considerations can be transferred to it-cleft sentences
Information structure
[edit]Clefts have been described as "equative" (Halliday 1976), "stative" (Delin and Oberlander 1995) and as "variable-value pairs", where the cleft constituent gives a variable expressed by the cleft clause (Herriman 2004, Declerck 1994, Halliday 1994). A major area of interest with regard to cleft constructions involves their information structure. The concept of "information structure" relates to the type of information encoded in a particular utterance, that can be one of these three:
- NEW information: things that the speaker/writer expects their hearer/reader might not already know
- GIVEN information: information that the speaker/writer expects the hearer/reader may be familiar with
- INFERRABLE information: information that the speaker/writer may expect the hearer/reader to be able to infer either from world knowledge or from previous discourse
The reason why information structure plays such an important role in the area of clefts is largely due to the fact that the organisation of information structure is tightly linked to the clefts' function as focusing tools used by speakers/writers to draw attention to salient parts of their message.
While it may be reasonable to assume that the variable of a cleft (that is, the material encoded by cleft clauses) may be typically GIVEN and its value (expressed by the cleft constituent) is NEW, it is not always so. Sometimes, neither element contains new information, as is in some demonstrative clefts, e.g., That is what I think and sometimes it is the cleft clause that contains the NEW part of the message, as in And that's when I got sick (Calude 2009). Finally, in some constructions, it is the equation between cleft clause and cleft constituent that brings about the newsworthy information, rather than any of the elements of the cleft themselves (Lambrecht 2001).
Other languages
[edit]Mandarin
[edit]The shì...de construction in Mandarin is used to produce the equivalent of cleft sentences. However, in traditional grammar, shì...de clefts were seen as a construction with a function in reference to the construction as a whole. Both shì, the copula, and de can occur in other contexts that express information-structural categories, but they are sometimes hard to distinguish from shì...de clefts.[17] In addition, certain constructions with relative clauses have been referred to as "pseudo-cleft" constructions. See Chinese grammar § Cleft sentences for details.
Examples:[17]
Zhāngsān
Zhangsan
shì
COP
zuótiān
yesterday
lái-de.
come-DE
"It was yesterday that Zhangsan came."
Zhāngsān
Zhangsan
shì
COP
míngtiān
tomorrow
lái.
come
"Concerning Zhangsan, it is the case that he will come tomorrow."
Zhāngsān
Zhangsan
zuótiān
yesterday
lái-de.
come-DE
"It was yesterday that Zhangsan came."
Spanish
[edit]Several constructions play the role of cleft sentences in Spanish. A very common resource is the adding of "es que" (time-dependent). Similar to English cleft sentences, time-dependent cleft constructions in Spanish also share a temporal relationship between the verb of the relative clause and the copula.[18]
¿Cómo
how
es
is.PRS-3sg
que
that
vas?
go.PRS.PROG-2sg
"How is it that you're going?"
¿Adónde
Where
fue
is.PST-3sg
que
that
fuiste?
go.PST-2sg
"Where was it that you went?"
From uncleft ¿Adónde fuiste?
Another mechanism is the use of the identificating structure, or relative pronouns, "el/la que", "el/la cual" as well as the neuters: "lo que" and "lo cual". This form of cleft construction highlights an importance between the entity and the number and gender of said entity that is uttered in a cleft sentence.[18]
El
He
que
that
va
go.PRS-3sg
es
is.PRS-sg
Juan
Juan
"Who's going is John."
Lo
It.N
que
that
no
NEG
quiero
want.PRS-1sg
es
is.PRS-3sg
ir
go.INF
"What I don't want is to go."
Possible uncleft variants: No quiero ir, Ir no quiero
Furthermore, one can also utilize "cuando" and "donde" when one wants to refer to "that" in a frame of time or place.
Fue
Is.PST-3sg
en
in
Londres
London
donde
where
nací
born.PST-1sg
"It was in London that I was born."
"Fue en Londres donde nací" (It was in London that I was born), possible uncleft variants Nací en Londres
French
[edit]In French, when a cleft is used to reply to a wh-question, it can appear in a complete form Matrix 'C'est XP' + relative clause 'que/qui YP' or in a reduced form Matrix 'C'est XP'.
Example:
- "C'est Jean que je cherche" (It's Jean whom I'm looking for)
- "C'est à Paris que j'habite" (It's in Paris where I live)
Example with Gloss:[19]
Cleft sentences are the most natural way to answer a wh-question in French.[19] For example, if one were to ask:
a.
Qui
Who
est
is-PRS-3SG
ce
it-SG
qui
that
a
3.SG
mangé
ate-3SG.PST
un
a.M
biscuit?
biscuit-NOM.SG?
Who ate a cookie?
It would be answered with the following it-cleft:
b.
C'
It
est
is-PRS.3SG
Ella
Ella
qui
that
a
3SG
mangé
ate-3SG.PST
un
a.M
biscuit
cookie-NOM.SG
"It is Ella that ate a cookie"
Japanese
[edit]The X no wa (ga) construction in Japanese is frequently used to produce the equivalent of cleft sentences. In addition, a gap precedes its filler in both subject cleft (SC) constructions and object cleft (OC) constructions. Japanese speakers have reported that there is an object gap preference in Japanese cleft constructions due to temporal structural ambiguities in subject clefts.[20]
Example:[21]
Watashitachi
We
ga
NOM
sagashite
look.for
iru
PRES
no
C
wa
TOP
Joey
Joey
da.
COP
"It's Joey whom we're looking for."
Example of a subject cleft construction:[20]
Kyonen
Last year
<gap>
sobo-o
grandma-ACC
inaka-de
village-LOC
kaihoushita-nowa
nursed-NOWA
shinseki-da-to
relative-COP-COMP
haha-ga
mother-NOM
it-ta.
say-PAST
"Mother said it is the relative who nursed my grandmother last year at the village."
Example of an object cleft construction:[20]
Kyonen
Last year
sobo-ga
Grandma-NOM
<gap>
inaka-de
village-LOC
kaihoushita-nowa
nursed-NOWA
shinseki-da-to
relative-COP-COMP
haha-ga
mother-NOM
it-ta.
say-PAST
"Mother said it is the relative whom my grandmother nursed last year at the village."
Goidelic languages
[edit]The construction is frequent in the Goidelic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Manx), much more so than in English, and can be used in ways that would be ambiguous or ungrammatical in English: almost any element of a sentence can be clefted. That sometimes carries over into the local varieties of English (Highland English, Lowland Scots, Scottish English, Hiberno-English).
The following examples from Scottish Gaelic are based on the sentence "Chuala Iain an ceòl a-raoir", "Iain heard the music last night":
- 'S e Iain a chuala an ceòl a-raoir ("It's Iain who heard the music last night" e.g. as opposed to Mary)
- 'S e an ceòl a chuala Iain a-raoir ("It's the music that Iain heard last night" e.g. as opposed to the speech)
- 'S ann a-raoir a chuala Iain an ceòl ("It's last night that Iain heard the music" e.g. as opposed to last week)
- 'S ann a chuala Iain an ceòl a-raoir ("It's heard that Iain the music last night" e.g. as opposed to making the music)
Tagalog
[edit].png)
Cleft sentences in Tagalog are copula constructions in which the focused element serves as the predicate of the sentence.
Ang
NOM
babae
woman
ang
NOM
bumili
ACT.bought
ng
ACC
bahay.
house
"The (one who) bought the house was the woman."
Si
NOM
Juan
Juan
ang
NOM
binigyan
gave.PASS
ni
GEN
Pedro
Pedro
ng
ACC
pera.
money
"The (one to whom) Pedro had given money was Juan."
(or: "The (one who) was given money to by Pedro was Juan.")
In the examples in (1) and (2), the foci are in bold. The remaining portions of the cleft sentences in (1) and (2) are noun phrases that contain headless relative clauses. (NB: Tagalog does not have an overt copula.)
This construction is also used for WH-questions in Tagalog, when the WH-word used in the question is either sino "who" or ano "what", as illustrated in (3) and (4).
Sino
who.NOM
ang
NOM
bumili
ACT.bought
ng
ACC
bahay?
house
"Who bought the house?"
(or: "Who was the (one who) bought the house?")
Ano
what
ang
NOM
ibinigay
gave.PASS
ni
GEN
Pedro
Pedro
kay
DAT
Juan?
Juan
"What did Pedro give to Juan?"
(or: "What was the (thing that) was given to Juan by Pedro?")
Notes
[edit]- ^ a b Bevacqua, Luca; Scheffler, Tatjana (2020-01-01). "Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English". Linguistics Vanguard. 6 (1) 20190066. doi:10.1515/lingvan-2019-0066. ISSN 2199-174X. S2CID 230284069.
Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- ^ Reeve, Matthew (2011-01-01). "The syntactic structure of English clefts". Lingua. 121 (2): 142–171. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.05.004. ISSN 0024-3841.
- ^ a b c d Sportiche, Dominique (23 September 2013). An introduction to syntactic analysis and theory. Wiley. ISBN 978-1-118-47048-0. OCLC 861536792.
- ^ Collins, Peter Craig (2002) [1991]. Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English (1st ed.). London: Routledge. p. 27–28. ISBN 978-0-203-20246-3.
Frequencies for the different relative clause types in the corpus are presented in Table 3.1, which shows that the prototypical pseudo-cleft with relative clause introduced by what is statistically dominant, and that the fused-type is almost three times as common as the lexically-headed type.
- ^ Zhou, Hui; Chen, Ming (2021-05-28). "What Still Needs to be Noted: Pseudo-Clefts in the Academic Discourse of Applied Linguistics". Frontiers in Psychology. 12 672349. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672349. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 8194822. PMID 34122267.
- ^ Akmajian, Adrian (1970). "On Deriving Cleft Sentences from Pseudo-Cleft Sentences". Linguistic Inquiry. 1 (2): 149–168. ISSN 0024-3892. JSTOR 4177550.
- ^ Irgin, Pelin (Oct 2013). "A Difficulty Analysis of Cleft Sentences". International Online Journal of Education & Teaching. 1 (1). Retrieved April 20, 2022.
- ^ a b c BONELLI, ELENA TOGNINI (1992-01-01). "'All I'm Saying Is…': The Correlation of Form and Function in Pseudo-cleft Sentences". Literary and Linguistic Computing. 7 (1): 30–42. doi:10.1093/llc/7.1.30. ISSN 0268-1145.
- ^ a b c Pelin, Irgin (Oct 2013). "A Difficulty Analysis of Cleft Sentences". International Online Journal of Education & Teaching. 1 (1). Retrieved April 20, 2022.
- ^ a b c Delahunty, Gerald P. (1995). "The Inferential Reconstruction" (PDF). Pragmatics. 5 (3): 341–364. doi:10.1075/prag.5.3.03del. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 March 2020. Retrieved 13 April 2022.
- ^ Calude, Andreea S.; Delahunty, Gerald P. (2011-09-01). "Inferentials in spoken English". Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association. 21 (3): 307–340. doi:10.1075/prag.21.3.02cal. hdl:10289/8007. ISSN 1018-2101.
- ^ a b c d e Collins, Peter (October 1992). "Cleft existential in English". Language Sciences. 14 (4): 419–433. doi:10.1016/0388-0001(92)90024-9.
- ^ Irgin, Pelin (October 2013). "A difficulty Analysis of Cleft Sentences". International Online Journal of Education & Teaching. 1 (1). Retrieved April 17, 2022.
- ^ Akmajian 1970, Bolinger 1972, Edmonds 1976, Gundel 1977 and Borkin 1984
- ^ Chomsky 1977, Delin 1989, Delahunty 1982, Heggie 1988, Kiss 1998, Lambrecht 2001
- ^ Huddleston and Pullum 2002 provide a comprehensive survey
- ^ a b Hole, Daniel (September 2011). "The deconstruction of Chinese shì...de clefts revisited". Lingua. 121 (11): 1707–1733. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.07.004.
- ^ a b Plaza de la Ossa, Myriam (2008). "Efectos de concordancia en las oraciones escindidas del español". Dicenda. 26: 193–218.
- ^ a b Hamlaoui, Fatima (2007). "FRENCH CLEFT SENTENCES AND THE SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY INTERFACE" (PDF). University of Toronto: 11.
- ^ a b c Sakamoto, Tsutomu; Tateyama, Yuki; Yano, Masataka (2014). "Processing of Japanese Cleft Constructions in Context: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 44 (3): 277–286. doi:10.1007/s10936-014-9294-6. PMID 24652069. S2CID 207201749.
- ^ Hiraiwa, Ken; Ishihara, Shinichiro (June 2012). "Syntactic Metamorphosis: Clefts, Sluicing, and In-Situ Focus in Japanese". Syntax. 15 (2): 142–180. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00164.x. Retrieved April 21, 2022.
References
[edit]- Akmajian, A. 1970. On deriving cleft sentences from pseudo-cleft sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 1(149-168).
- Bolinger, D. 1972. A Look at Equations and Cleft Sentences. In Firchow, E., editor, Studies for Einar Haugen, pages 96–114. Mouton de Gruyter, The Hague.
- Borkin, A. 1984. Problems in Form and Function. Ablex, Norwood, NJ.
- Bresnan, J. and Grimshaw, J. (1978). The Syntax of Free Relatives in English. Linguistic Inquiry, 9:331–391.
- Calude, Andreea S. 2009. Cleft Constructions in Spoken English. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken.
- Chomsky, N. 1977. On wh-movement. In Culicover, P., Wasow, T., and Akmajian, A., editors, Formal Syntax, pages 71–132. Academic Press, New York.
- Collins, P. 1991. Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English. Routledge, London.
- Declerk, R. 1994. The taxonomy and interpretation of clefts and pseudoclefts. Lingua, 9(1):183–220.
- Delahunty, G.P. 1982. Topics in the syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences. Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington.
- Delin, J. 1989. Cleft constructions in discourse. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh.
- Delin, J. and Oberlander, J. 1995. Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: the case of it-clefts. Linguistics, 33:456–500.
- Dušková, L. 2005, From the Heritage of Vilém Mathesius and Jan Firbas: Syntax in the Service of FSP. Theory and Practice in English Studies. Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 3:7-23.
- Emonds, J. 1976. A Transformational Approach to English Syntax. Academic Press, New York.
- Finegan, Edward. 2004. Language: Its Structure and Use. 4th ed. Boston etc. Thompson. p. 260-277.
- Gundel, J. 1977. Where do clefts sentences come from? Language, 53:542–559.
- Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar. Arnold, London, 2nd Edition.
- Halliday, M.A.K. 1976. Some aspects of the thematic organization of the English clause. In Kress, G., editor, System and Function in Language, pages 174–188. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Hedberg, N. 2000. The referential status of clefts. Language, 76(4):891–920.
- Heggie, L. 1988. The Syntax of Copular Structures. Doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California.
- Herriman, J. 2004. Identifying relations: the semantic functions of wh-clefts in English. Text, 24(4):447–469.
- Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, New York.
- Kiss, K. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language, 74(2):245–273.
- Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics, 39(3):463-516.
- Luo, C. 2009. Cleftability in Language. Wuhan University Press, China.
- Miller, J. 1999. Magnasyntax and syntactic analysis. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, IV(2):7–20.
- Miller, J. 1996. Clefts, particles and word order in languages of Europe. Language Sciences, 18(1-2):111–125.
- Moro, A. 1997. The raising of predicates. Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Uk.
- Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman, London, New York.
- Sornicola, R. 1988. It -clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types. Linguistics, 24:343–379.
Cleft sentence
View on GrokipediaOverview
Definition
A cleft sentence is a complex construction in linguistics that divides the content of a simple clause into two parts—a main clause and a subordinate clause—to emphasize a particular constituent, typically through the use of a copula and a relative clause.[4] This structure allows for the highlighting of specific information without altering the underlying propositional meaning of the original clause. The key components of a cleft sentence are the focused element (the highlighted constituent), the copula (often "is" or "was"), and the relative clause, which conveys the presupposed background information assumed to be known or true. For example, the simple sentence "John left" can be restructured as the cleft "It was John who left," where "John" receives emphasis as the focus, while the relative clause "who left" provides the unchanged background, demonstrating how the cleft adds prominence to one element.[5] The term "cleft" derives from Old English geclyft, meaning a split or fissure, which reflects the way the construction cleaves a single clause into distinct parts.[6] The phrase "cleft sentence" was first introduced by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in his analysis of English grammar.[7]Functions in Discourse
Cleft sentences serve several primary functions in discourse, primarily by manipulating focus to structure information flow. They often convey contrastive focus, highlighting a particular element against alternatives to emphasize differences, as seen in examples like "It was John, not Mary, who left early."[8] This function aids in clarifying distinctions within ongoing conversations. Additionally, clefts can express exhaustive focus, implying that the highlighted element is the only relevant one, such as in "It is John that is a student," though this exhaustivity is pragmatically inferred and cancellable in certain contexts.[8] Finally, they facilitate corrective focus, rectifying prior assumptions or errors, for instance, "No, it’s not the contras that are making it dire."[8] In broader discourse roles, cleft sentences contribute to narrative construction by setting scenes or emphasizing pivotal details, such as initiating a story with "It was less than a week ago that this happened."[8] They also appear in argumentative contexts to persuade or reinforce points, like "It was the President who initiated the policy," strengthening claims through focused assertion.[8] Furthermore, clefts are common in responses to questions, providing direct answers that align with wh-questions or implied inquiries, as in replying to "Who did it?" with "It was Gulbenkian who said no."[8] These roles, drawn from analyses of spoken and written corpora, underscore clefts' utility in maintaining coherence and advancing dialogue.[8] Prosodic features play a crucial role in reinforcing these functions, with intonation patterns marking the focused element. In it-clefts, a falling tone often applies to the presupposed clause when the focused element is given information, while a fall-fall pattern across two intonation phrases signals both parts as informative, as in "It was in nineteen hundred and six / that the Queen’s great-grandfather decreed."[9] Nuclear stress typically falls on the clefted constituent in topic-clause clefts, enhancing contrast, exemplified by prominence on "CONtras" in "It is the contras who have cried uncle."[8] Non-neutral tones, such as fall-rise or high-fall, further emphasize corrective or contrastive focus, appearing in about 11.7% of it-clefts to heighten pragmatic effects.[9] Empirical studies confirm that while cleft sentences may increase processing demands, as evidenced by longer reading times in self-paced experiments attributed to dependency computations between the pronoun and clefted noun phrase.[10] Corpus-based analyses of 700 English cleft tokens further support their discourse efficacy, revealing frequent use in contrastive and corrective contexts to boost informational clarity despite added syntactic complexity.[8] Recent research as of 2025 has extended these findings to computational linguistics, examining clefts in language models for better understanding of filler-gap dependencies and focus in multilingual settings.[11]Types in English
It-cleft
The it-cleft is the most prevalent type of cleft construction in English, formed by a dummy pronoun "it" followed by a copula (typically a form of "be"), a focused constituent, and a relative clause introduced by "that," "who," or "which."[1] This structure divides a simple proposition into a highlighted element and a presupposed background, as in the canonical example "It was the butler who did it," where "the butler" is the focused noun phrase and "who did it" is the relative clause.[1] The copula links the focused element to the relative clause, creating a biclausal configuration that emphasizes contrast or specificity.[12] Syntactically, it-clefts involve extraposition of the relative clause to a peripheral position, placing the focused constituent immediately after the copula in a preverbal slot.[12] The focused element can be a noun phrase, prepositional phrase, adjective phrase, or even a clause, such as "It was in the kitchen that the cake was baked" (prepositional phrase focus) or "It was orange that the fruit was" (adjective phrase focus).[1] The dummy "it" functions as a non-referring subject, filling the syntactic role without semantic content, while the relative clause acts as a restrictive modifier coindexed with the focused constituent, though not fully embedded as in standard relative clauses.[12] This arrangement results in a specificational copular sentence, where the structure is non-reversible and exhibits obligatory extraposition, distinguishing it from simpler copular constructions.[13] Semantically, it-clefts presuppose the content of the relative clause as an open proposition (e.g., "someone did it" in the butler example) while exhaustively asserting the focused element as the unique value satisfying that proposition.[12] This creates an exhaustive focus effect, implying no other entity fulfills the presupposed condition, akin to an "only" implicature, as in "It was John that I saw," which presupposes "I saw someone" and excludes alternatives.[1] The construction thus serves to identify and contrast, reinforcing the focused element's exclusivity within the discourse context.[12] The it-cleft emerged in Late Middle English as an innovation from converging copular and cleft-like structures, with early forms allowing variable agreement between the copula and focused element.[14] Historical records show its development through schematization, increasing in frequency and expanding to include diverse focused constituents like prepositional phrases by the Early Modern period.[13] An example from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale illustrates this: "It am I that loveth so hote Emilye the brighte," where the cleft clause verb agrees with the dummy "it," reflecting transitional syntax before modern standardization.[15] A common variation involves negation, typically placed after the copula to deny the focused constituent, as in "It wasn't me who left," which presupposes "someone left" while exhaustively excluding the speaker.[8] Negative it-clefts often imply contrast or rectification, functioning metalinguistically to correct prior assumptions, such as "It’s not California but all society that weighs risks unevenly," highlighting denial of a specific attribution in favor of a broader one.[8] This variation reinforces exhaustive focus through negation, suspending or challenging the presupposed variable's application to the denied element.[8]Pseudo-cleft
Pseudo-cleft sentences, also known as wh-clefts, are formed by an initial wh-clause functioning as a free relative clause, followed by a copula (typically "be" in its appropriate tense or form) and a focused post-copular constituent that provides the value or specification. For example, in "What Sue was looking for was this cat," the wh-clause "What Sue was looking for" acts as the subject, the copula "was" links the two parts, and "this cat" is the focused element identifying the variable introduced by the wh-clause. This structure contrasts with true wh-questions, as the wh-clause here is declarative in intent, presupposing an open proposition rather than seeking information.[16] The types of pseudo-clefts vary based on the wh-word employed, with "what" being the most common, followed by "who" for animate referents, and less frequently "where," "when," "why," or "how" in contexts that yield equative or predicational readings. For instance, "Who broke the vase was Robert" uses "who" to specify an individual, while "Where they met was in Paris" employs "where" for locative focus.[16] These wh-words introduce a variable in the initial clause, which the post-copular element resolves, distinguishing pseudo-clefts from interrogatives by their specificational rather than interrogative force. Semantically, pseudo-clefts function as specificational clauses, where the wh-clause denotes a property or variable (e.g., λx. looking for'(Sue, x)) and the post-copular constituent supplies the referential value (e.g., this cat), often implying exhaustivity such that the value uniquely satisfies the variable. This specificational relation carries existential presuppositions from the wh-clause and contrastive focus on the value, as in "What Mike bought was a muffin," presupposing that Mike bought something and specifying it exhaustively as a muffin.[16] The construction thus links the thematic wh-clause (topic) to the rhematic post-copular element (comment), with truth conditions sensitive to factors like quantifier scope and tense alignment between clauses. Usage constraints limit what can occupy the post-copular position, typically restricting it to definite or indefinite determiner phrases (DPs), proper names, or pronouns, while excluding bare noun phrases (NPs), adjectives (APs), or prepositional phrases (PPs) in isolation. Focusing verbs or adjectives is possible but requires do-support for verbs (e.g., "What Mike did was buy a beer") and is infelicitous for statives; universal quantifiers like "everything" or "all" are generally avoided in focus, though idiomatic expressions such as "All I want is peace" occur in fixed contexts. Additional restrictions include no extraction, gapping, or negation in the post-copular slot, and subjects must be thematic rather than strongly quantificational. In discourse, pseudo-clefts often convey exhaustive focus, specifying the unique value that completes the presupposed scenario without alternatives.Inverted Pseudo-cleft
The inverted pseudo-cleft, also known as the reversed wh-cleft, is a variant of the pseudo-cleft construction in English where the focused value precedes the copula and the wh-clause, forming structures such as "Value + copula + wh-clause."[17] For instance, in contrast to the standard pseudo-cleft "What he wanted was a new car," the inverted form reverses this to "A new car is what he wanted," placing initial emphasis on the value.[18] This order serves as a stylistic variant of the pseudo-cleft, enhancing focus on the value while maintaining the specificational relationship between the two elements.[19] Syntactically, the inverted pseudo-cleft resembles an equative sentence, with the value functioning as the subject and the embedded wh-clause acting as the predicate, often analyzed as a free relative clause headed by a semantically empty copula.[8] The wh-clause, typically introduced by "what," "who," or "where," specifies or identifies the value, creating a reversible structure where the clefted constituent must be referential (e.g., a noun phrase like "Champagne" in "Champagne is what I like").[18] This configuration allows for flexibility, such as inserting pronouns like "one" in cases of omission (e.g., "The one that bit me was the brownish one"), and it embeds the clause as a composite element akin to "it + that."[18] In discourse, inverted pseudo-clefts often function to provide direct specification, particularly in responses to questions, by thematizing the value and introducing new information via the wh-clause as rheme.[19] They emphasize contrast, clarification, or exhaustivity (e.g., "A job is what he wants" in reply to "What does he need?"), and can re-express activated topics or mark transitions, with the cleft clause bearing primary accent for comment focus.[8] Examples include "For Schmidt (1990), intake is what learners consciously notice," which highlights a key term in academic discussion.[19] These constructions are relatively rare, more prevalent in spoken English and informal writing than in formal registers, with corpus analyses showing low frequencies such as 0.04 per 1,000 words in written corpora like the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) and around 30.6 instances per million words in applied linguistics texts.[19] In the British National Corpus (BNC), they appear sporadically in conversational contexts, underscoring their marked status compared to standard pseudo-clefts.[20] Acceptability varies by speaker and context, often deemed less common due to their emphasis on initial value placement.[18]Other English Variants
All-clefts represent a specialized variant of pseudo-cleft constructions in English, where the quantifier "all" heads a relative clause to emphasize the totality or exhaustiveness of the focused element. For instance, in the sentence "All that I want is a cup of tea," the construction highlights that the speaker's desire is limited entirely to a cup of tea, often conveying a sense of minimalism or the "smallness effect," where the focused item is presented as not much in quantity or significance. This variant presupposes the truth of the relative clause content while asserting the exhaustive identification of the post-copular element. Inferential clefts, often appearing in spoken English, involve constructions that imply a deduction or interpretation drawn from contextual evidence, functioning as a subtype of it-clefts adapted for discourse inference.[8] An example is "There was a man came to see you," where the speaker infers the visitor's identity or purpose based on available clues, such as traces left behind, rather than direct observation.[21] These clefts presuppose an underlying event or state but leave room for interpretive uncertainty, with the focused clause providing the inferred explanation.[22] They are particularly prevalent in regional dialects and spoken varieties, such as New Zealand English, where corpus data show their role in casual, evidence-based narration.[21] There-clefts utilize the existential "there" construction to present new or noteworthy information with a focus on existence or location, serving a presentative function in discourse.[8] For example, "There's the book you wanted" introduces the object into the shared context, emphasizing its availability or relevance while presupposing the addressee's prior interest in it.[8] Unlike standard it-clefts, there-clefts shift emphasis toward introducing entities rather than contrasting them, often in informal or demonstrative settings.[8] If-because clefts integrate causal or conditional elements into the cleft structure to highlight reasons or explanations, linking the focused cause to an effect.[22] In "It's because he was tired that he left," the construction presupposes the event of leaving and asserts the fatigue as the exhaustive cause, often rectifying potential misconceptions about motivation.[22] This variant, akin to inferential congeners, relies on shared contextual inference for its causal interpretation.[22] These variants differ from core cleft types in their presupposition strength and regional distribution: all-clefts and if-because clefts carry robust existential and exhaustive presuppositions similar to it-clefts, treating the background clause as given, whereas inferential and there-clefts exhibit weaker, more context-dependent presuppositions that accommodate inferable or new information.[8] Inferential clefts show notable regional usage in spoken dialects like those of New Zealand or informal British English, where they facilitate evidential reasoning, while the others appear more evenly across standard varieties but favor conversational contexts.[21]Information and Structural Properties
Information Structure
Cleft sentences play a central role in the functional sentence perspective, a theoretical framework that examines how languages structure information to distinguish between given (presupposed) and new (focused) elements within an utterance. In this perspective, the presupposition carries background information assumed to be known or recoverable from the discourse context, while the focus highlights the new or contrastive information that advances the communication. For instance, in the it-cleft "It was John who broke the window," the clause "who broke the window" presupposes that someone broke the window, and "John" serves as the focus, identifying the specific agent as new information. This division enhances clarity and coherence in discourse by explicitly packaging information, as outlined in foundational work on information structure. A key pragmatic feature of cleft sentences is the exhaustivity inference, where the focused element implies exclusivity—suggesting that only the mentioned item satisfies the presupposed condition, akin to an "only" operator. This inference arises not from semantics alone but from pragmatic enrichment, as evidenced by experimental linguistics studies showing that listeners interpret clefts as exhaustive more reliably than non-cleft alternatives. For example, in response to a question about who attended an event, "It was Mary who came" implies no one else did, supported by eye-tracking and acceptability judgment tasks in psycholinguistic research. Such data confirm that exhaustivity strengthens the cleft's role in precise information conveyance, distinguishing it from mere assertion. Compared to other focus-marking strategies like prosodic stress accent (e.g., emphasizing "JOHN" in "John broke the window") or syntactic fronting (e.g., "John, he broke the window"), cleft constructions provide more explicit and robust marking of the information structure. While stress and fronting rely on intonation or word order for subtlety, clefts use dedicated syntactic templates to isolate the focus, reducing ambiguity in complex discourses and allowing for greater emphasis on the new information. This explicitness makes clefts particularly effective in contexts requiring contrast or correction, though they may incur higher processing costs. In formal semantics, Knud Lambrecht's model of identification focus elucidates how clefts operate across three tiers of information structure: the proposition (the open sentence with a variable), the activation state (presupposed content), and the focus domain (the identified value). Lambrecht posits that clefts express identification focus, where the speaker identifies a referent from a presupposed set, as in pseudo-clefts like "The one who broke the window was John," which presupposes the existence of a unique breaker. This model integrates pragmatics and semantics, showing clefts as devices for resolving referential ambiguity. A simplified textual diagram of these tiers is as follows:| Tier | Component | Example in "It was John who left" |
|---|---|---|
| Proposition | Open sentence with variable | x left |
| Activation State | Presupposition | Someone left |
| Focus Domain | Identification | John (exhaustive) |
Syntactic Characteristics
Cleft sentences exhibit complex constituent structures that have sparked significant debate in generative linguistics regarding whether they are biclausal or monoclausal. In the traditional biclausal analysis, it-clefts are treated as comprising a matrix clause headed by the copula "be" with the expletive "it" as subject, and an embedded relative clause containing the focused constituent (e.g., Chomsky 1977). This view posits a structure like [TP it be [CP XP that S]], where the relative clause is subordinate and the focused XP is extracted within it.[23] Proponents argue that this accounts for the distribution of it-clefts in non-finite and embedded contexts, such as "For it to be John who wins," which parallels full clauses but not simple focus fronting.[23] In contrast, quasi-monoclausal analyses propose a single clause where the focused constituent undergoes movement to the left periphery, unifying it-clefts with focus constructions and avoiding biclausality (e.g., Meinunger 1998; Frascarelli & Ramaglia 2013).[23] However, this approach struggles with tests like the middle construction placement (MCP), where it-clefts behave as biclausal elements, and economy considerations in the cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997), leading recent work to favor the biclausal structure despite its apparent complexity.[23][24] Movement analyses within generative grammar often invoke focus movement to the specifier of a Focus Phrase (SpecFocP) in the left periphery to derive the surface order of it-clefts. In the embedded movement approach (Belletti 2009), the focused constituent raises internally within the relative clause to SpecFocP, yielding a biclausal derivation as in the following simplified tree:[TP it be [vP [FocP the cat_i [FinP that [TP Mary saw t_i ]]]]]
[TP it be [vP [FocP the cat_i [FinP that [TP Mary saw t_i ]]]]]
[FocP [NP John]_i [FamP [CP that I saw t_i] [IP it is t_i ]]]
[FocP [NP John]_i [FamP [CP that I saw t_i] [IP it is t_i ]]]