Clases De Palabras

Cleft sentence

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. This focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation.

In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as follows:

it + conjugated form of to be + X + subordinate clause

where it is a cleft pronoun and X is usually a noun phrase (although it can also be a prepositional phrase, and in some cases an adjectival or adverbial phrase). The focus is on X, or else on the subordinate clause or some element of it. For example:

• It's Joey (whom) we're looking for.

• It's money that I love.

• It was from John that she heard the news.

• It was meeting Jim that really started me off on this new line of work.

Types

English is very rich in cleft constructions. Below are examples of other types of clefts found in English, though the list is not exhaustive (see Lambrecht 2001 for a comprehensive survey, Collins 1991 for an in-depth analysis of it-clefts and wh-clefts in English, and Calude 2009 for an investigation of clefts in spoken English).

• It-cleft: It is Jaime for whom we are looking.

• Wh-cleft/Pseudo-cleft:[1] What he wanted to buy was a Fiat.

• Reversed wh-cleft/Inverted pseudo-cleft: A Fiat is what he wanted to buy.

• All-cleft: All he wanted to buy was a Fiat.

• Inferential cleft: It is not that he loves her. It's just that he has a way with her that is different.

• There-cleft: And then there's a new house he wanted to build.

• If-because cleft: If he wants to be an actor it's because he wants to be famous.

Unfortunately, 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).

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 particlesand so on (see Miller 1996). Cleftability in Language (2009) by Cheng Luo presents a cross-linguistic discussion of cleftability.

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