Cleft Sentences

An it-cleft starts with "It was/is" and names the focused element right away ("It was Sarah who won"). A wh-cleft starts with a wh-word ("What I need is…") and puts the focus at the end. Both appear in speech and writing — wh-clefts feel especially natural in conversation, while it-clefts are the more frequent type overall and common in formal prose.

"It was the delay that annoyed customers" is an it-cleft, and "What annoyed customers was the delay" is a wh-cleft. Both come from the plain sentence "The delay annoyed customers" and keep its meaning — they only change which part is stressed.

Start with "It is/was," add the element you want to stress, then join the rest of the sentence with "that" (or "who" for a person): "It was in Paris that we met." The focus can be a subject, object, time, place or reason.

An all-cleft uses "all" instead of "what": "All I want is a quiet evening." It means "the only thing I want," so it adds a limiting, slightly modest tone that a plain wh-cleft does not.

A cleft sentence splits one idea into two clauses so you can emphasise one part of it. "Sarah won the prize" becomes "It was Sarah who won the prize", which puts the spotlight on Sarah. The meaning is the same; the emphasis is not.

A wh-cleft (also called a pseudo-cleft) begins with a wh-word and saves the emphasised part for the end: "What I need is a holiday." Because English naturally stresses the end of a sentence, wh-clefts sound more conversational than it-clefts.

Use them whenever you want to explicitly signal what matters most — academic writing and journalism lean on it-clefts heavily, but wh-clefts are just as natural in everyday speech. Don't overuse either type in casual conversation; normal stress and intonation often do the same job without extra structure.

Both, in practice. Many C1 courses (including the British Council's C1 grammar hub) introduce cleft sentences under "emphasis," and fuller command of both it-clefts and wh-clefts — including their effect on what counts as new vs. given information — is a C2-level expectation. This page files the topic at C2, but the it-cleft in particular is worth learning a level early.

A cleft sentence restructures the whole clause around "it" or a wh-word ("It was John who broke it"). Fronting simply moves an existing element to the front without adding that framing ("That, John broke"). Clefts are more emphatic and more formal than plain fronting.

Cleft sentences ("It was Sarah who won") isolate one element using "it" or a wh-word and don't require subject-verb inversion. Negative-adverbial inversion ("Never have I seen…") reorders the auxiliary and subject instead, and is used specifically after fronted negative or restrictive adverbials.

Pseudo-cleft is another name for the wh-cleft — "What I want is more time," "All I need is a good rest." It's called "pseudo" because, unlike the it-cleft, it looks like an ordinary subject-verb-complement sentence, just with a wh-clause as the subject.

The cleft clause is the second half of a cleft sentence — the part introduced by "that," "who," or a wh-word, carrying the information that isn't in focus. In "It was Sarah who won the competition," "who won the competition" is the cleft clause; "Sarah" is the focused element in front of it.

Clefting is the linguistic term for restructuring a single clause into two — an "it" or wh-word clause plus a cleft clause — purely to control emphasis. "Sarah won" (one clause) becomes "It was Sarah who won" (two clauses) through clefting; the underlying meaning doesn't change, only what's foregrounded.

"Cleft construction" (or "cleft structure") is another name for a cleft sentence as a whole — it-cleft or wh-cleft — the term more common in grammar reference books and linguistics courses than in everyday teaching materials.