Cleft sentences

Cleft sentence is a such construction where normal sentence pattern is changed or

broken to give focus and to emphasize to one particular sentence element, and that
element can be subject, object, adverbial modifier. The pattern of cleft sentence is it +
be + focus + who/that + the rest of the clause. This means that one sentence can be
cleft in several ways, depending on which part of that sentence we want to stress. For
example, a sentence Tom sent the greeting card to Lyn because he forgot to buy her
a present can be cleft in more than one way, one would be It was Tom who sent the
greeting card to Lyn because he forgot to buy her a present, another would be It
was because he forgot to buy her a present that Tom sent a greeting card to Lyn and
so on.

It is important to note that in the first place in cleft sentences is always expletive It
and that It is called a cleft pronoun. If we compare cleft sentences and sentences
whose paraphrase they are, we can conclude that something is moved in the original
sentence in order to make a new, cleft sentence.

While in the normal sentence we can have a simple construction, for example Jill
told me about it, which is a simple clause, in cleft sentences construction is more
complex. Thus, in a cleft sentence It was Jill who told me about it, there is a
relative sentence It was Jill plus the rest of the sentence who told me about it.

Cleft sentences are very frequent in the English language.