Anthony R. Garcia
A cleft sentence allows a writer to place emphasis on an element within a sentence by moving that element out of its normal position into one of higher stress. The following examples show that different elements of the same sentence can be emphasized using a cleft sentence.
Original sentence: Mina ate the pizza last night.
Cleft sentence: It was Mina who ate the pizza last night.
The opening slot of a sentence is a position of low stress or emphasis. A cleft sentence allows you to shift the subject Mina to a position of higher stress in the sentence. The construction in the example is known as the it-cleft.
Here is the it-cleft emphasizing a different word in the sentence.
Cleft sentence: It was the pizza that Mina ate last night.
Here, the emphasis has shifted to pizza. Notice how this changes the point of the sentence; the sentence presumes that Mina ate something last night, but it’s not clear what. This statement answers that uncertainty by stating that it was in fact the pizza (not any other food) that Mina ate.
Cleft sentence: It was last night that Mina ate the pizza.
Again the focus changes, this time to when Mina ate the pizza (in this sentence, it is already known that Mina ate the pizza).
Another common cleft sentence is the what-cleft.
Original sentence: Lily likes taking other people’s money.
Cleft sentence: What Lily likes is taking other people’s money.
You can hear the additional emphasis placed on likes in the cleft sentence. The what-cleft can also be used to move the verb phrase of the original sentence into subject position:
Cleft sentence: Taking other people’s money is what Lily likes.
The cleft sentence is so called because it cleaves one clause into two:
Single clause: Mina ate the pizza last night.
Two clauses: It was Mina (independent clause) who ate the pizza last night (relative clause).