The simple sentence Simon studied French last year can be rewritten as:
It was Simon who studied French last year.
This is called a cleft sentence because the original simple sentence has been divided (or ‘cleft’) into two clauses:
Clause 1: It was Simon
Clause 2: who studied French last year
A cleft sentence is used when we wish to emphasize one element of the original sentence, often as a way of excluding other possibilities:
It was Simon who studied French last year (not Amy).
Here, Simon, the subject of the original sentence, is emphasized. We can also emphasize other elements, including the direct object French:
It was French that Simon studied last year (not German).
Finally, we can emphasize the adjunct last year:
It was last year that Simon studied French (not this year).
The emphasized element in a cleft sentence is called the focus. Cleft sentences are introduced by it, and the verb is always be.
Therefore the pattern of a cleft sentence is:
It Be Focus Clause
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
It was Simon who studied French last year.
It was Simon who studied French last year.
This is called a cleft sentence because the original simple sentence has been divided (or ‘cleft’) into two clauses:
Clause 1: It was Simon
Clause 2: who studied French last year
A cleft sentence is used when we wish to emphasize one element of the original sentence, often as a way of excluding other possibilities:
It was Simon who studied French last year (not Amy).
Here, Simon, the subject of the original sentence, is emphasized. We can also emphasize other elements, including the direct object French:
It was French that Simon studied last year (not German).
Finally, we can emphasize the adjunct last year:
It was last year that Simon studied French (not this year).
The emphasized element in a cleft sentence is called the focus. Cleft sentences are introduced by it, and the verb is always be.
Therefore the pattern of a cleft sentence is:
It Be Focus Clause
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
It was Simon who studied French last year.
