What is "cleft sentence"

n. (context linguistics English) A complex sentence whose meaning could be expressed by a simple sentence, and typically stressing a particular constituent, such as ''It's money that I love'' or ''It was from John that she heard the news''.

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.

Furthermore, one might also describe a cleft sentence as inverted. That is to say, it has its dependent clause in front of the main clause. So, rather than:

• We didn't meet her until we arrived at the hotel.

the cleft would be:

• It wasn't until we arrived at the hotel that (or when) we met her.