Cleft sentences in English: A comprehensive view

Abstract

This article addresses four questions: first, what sentence patterns may be considered ‘cleft sentences’; second, how they are related to one another; third, what function they serve within the larger structure of English; and fourth, where within the structure of English they may be situated. It is shown that there are three cleft sentence patterns which are produced by a single set of operations on a normal English sentence; each of the three—simple clefts, WH-clefts, and IT-clefts—is the output of a different stage of these operations. Cleft sentences, like structures introduced by it and there, belong to the group of Topic-Comment Redistribution transformations. These allow the speaker or writer to shift some of the component elements of a sentence to different positions, in order to make those elements more prominent, and to make the sequence of elements in the sentence conform more closely to the sequence of ideas in the text of which that sentence is a part.