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. It-clefts feel more formal and written; wh-clefts feel more natural in speech.

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 for written emphasis and contrast — academic writing, journalism, formal argument. In everyday speech, use them sparingly; overusing clefts can sound stilted, and normal stress or intonation often does the same job.

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.