Cleft sentence


A cleft sentence is a complex sentence 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:
where it is a cleft pronoun and X is usually a noun phrase. The focus is on X, or else on the subordinate clause or some element of it. For example:
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:
Example:
the cleft would be:
English is very rich in cleft constructions. Below are examples of other types of clefts found in English, though the list is not exhaustive.
Unfortunately, traditional accounts of cleft structures classify these according to the elements involved following English-centric analyses. 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.
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. Cleftability in Language by Cheng Luo presents a cross-linguistic discussion of cleftability.

Structural issues

The role of the cleft pronoun is controversial, and some believe it to be referential, while others treat it as a dummy pronoun or empty element. The former analysis has come to be termed the "expletive" view, whereas the latter is referred to as the "extraposition" approach. Hedberg 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 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, 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 posit a different analysis. They suggest that the relative clause is headed, with wh-word being located outside the clause proper and functioning as its head. Miller 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, while others reject this on the basis of a lack of noun phrase antecedent, as exemplified below:
Finally, 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:
Clefts have been described as "equative", "stative" and as "variable-value pairs", where the cleft constituent gives a variable expressed by the cleft clause. 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:
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 may be typically GIVEN and its value 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. 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.

Other languages

Chinese

The shì... construction in Mandarin is used to produce the equivalents of cleft sentences. Also, certain constructions with relative clauses have been referred to as "pseudo-cleft" constructions. See Chinese grammar → Cleft sentences for details.

Spanish

There exist several constructions which play the role of cleft sentences. A very common resource is the adding of "es que" :
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".
Furthermore, one can also utilize "cuando" and "donde" when one wants to refer to "that" in a frame of time or place.
The X no wa construction in Japanese is frequently used to produce the equivalent of cleft sentences.
The construction is frequent in the Goidelic languages, 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. This sometimes carries over into the local varieties of English.
The following examples from Scottish Gaelic are based on the sentence "Chuala Iain an ceòl a-raoir", "Iain heard the music last night":
Cleft sentences are copula constructions in which the focused element serves as the predicate of the sentence.
In the examples in and, the foci are in bold. The remaining portions of the cleft sentences in and 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 and.