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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. In spoken language, this focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as ...
Cleft sentence structures highlight particular aspects of a sentence and consider the surrounding information to be backgrounded knowledge. These sentences are typically not spoken to strangers, but rather to addressees who are aware of the ongoing situation. [9] Cleft construction: It was Henry that kissed Rosie. »Someone kissed Rosie.
A cleft sentence is one formed with the copular verb (generally with a dummy pronoun like "it" as its subject), plus a word that "cleaves" the sentence, plus a subordinate clause. They are often used to put emphasis on a part of the sentence. Here are some examples of English sentences and their cleft versions: "I did it."
A cleft is an opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation. Cleft may refer to: ... Cleft sentence, a type of grammatical construction; Places. Cleft Island (Antarctica) ...
A pseudo-cleft expressing the same thing, and with the same focus, would be: What the mouse ate was the cheese. This is also known as a 'specificational pseudo-cleft' (since Higgins 1973), not to be confused with the predicational pseudo-cleft (if it even is a pseudo-cleft; perhaps it should be a pseudo-pseudo-cleft!), an example of which is:
The copular clause consists of a copula followed by the cleft constituent. Cleft sentences are found in many European languages, including French. In the sentence, c'est Stella qui lit Kant ('It's Stella who reads Kant') "c'est Stella" is the copular clause, "Stella" is the cleft constituent, and "qui lit Kant" is the cleft clause. [10]
Tests for constituents are diagnostics used to identify sentence structure. There are numerous tests for constituents that are commonly used to identify the constituents of English sentences. 15 of the most commonly used tests are listed next: 1) coordination (conjunction), 2) pro-form substitution (replacement), 3) topicalization (fronting), 4) do-so-substitution, 5) one-substitution, 6 ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.