Cleft sentence
Below are examples of some types of clefts found in English, though the list is not exhaustive.
[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] 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.
[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.
[8]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] 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.
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.
[12] 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).
[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.
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: Finally, the last element of a cleft is the cleft constituent, which typically corresponds to the focus.
A major area of interest with regard to cleft constructions involves their information structure.
The shì...de construction in Mandarin is used to produce the equivalent of cleft sentences.
""Fue en Londres donde nací" (It was in London that I was born), possible uncleft variants Nací en Londres 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'.
The remaining portions of the cleft sentences in (1) and (2) are noun phrases that contain headless relative clauses.
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).
