Talk:Cleft sentence

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[edit] 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)

[edit] 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