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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 ...
Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in the English language whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula be – appears to "invert" (change places) with the subject. [1]
[10] [11] [12] If, however, one allows a small clause to contain a verb, then the sentences in (8d-e) can also be treated as containing small clauses: [13] The similarity across the sentences (8a-b-c) and (8d-e) is obvious, since the same subject-predicate relationship is present in all these sentences. Hence if one treats sentences (8a-b-c) as ...
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
In cleft sentences such as It's you who was right, the subject is the dummy pronoun it, but the predicand is the person being addressed, which corresponds to a complement in the VP. The predicate here is the VP in the relative clause modifier was right .
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL [n 1]) is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 and has been cited more than 8,000 times. [1]
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.