Talk:Cleft sentence

pseudo-cleft sentence

What's the difference between a cleft and a pseudo-cleft sentence?

An example of a cleft would be:

It was the cheese that the mouse ate.

A pseudo-cleft expressing the same thing, and with the same focus, would be:

What the mouse ate was the cheese.

This is also known as a 'specificational pseudo-cleft' (since Higgins 1973), not to be confused with the predicational pseudo-cleft (if it even is a pseudo-cleft; perhaps it should be a pseudo-pseudo-cleft!), an example of which is:

What the mouse ate was covered with mould.

Hope that helps. Matve 11:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

relation to Latin rhetoric

I wonder if clefting was prevalent in Latin rhetoric; you see clefting frequently in Spanish and French (hence the contraction of c'est due to very frequent, even clichéd use)

Not an expert by any means, just throwing it out there

non-finite clauses

Non-finite clause; 'It is to address a far-reaching problem that Oxfam is setting out to do.' I do not recognize this as a sentence that any native English speaker would make. Pamour (talk) 10:24, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

structural issues

Classifying the types could start with an examination of whether the clefting is applied to one or two sentences/clauses: 'inferential' and 'if-because' clefting are both applied to two sentences/clauses, the other types to only one. Pamour (talk) 12:40, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

In the first outline, they say Subordinate Claus when it looks like a relative clause? HNRR 75.15.132.119 (talk) 02:51, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Better clarity (examples)

Perhaps it might be clearer to split the examples given into distinct separate sentences shown explicitly, then reassemble them? Perhaps different coloured text would help? Or indeed some form of diagram showing a detour sign then end of detour. Care should be made to highlight inferred or unstated(implicit) connectors and illustrate variational forms. ELeP PerthAU (talk) 07:38, 21 December 2016 (UTC)ELeP PerthAU