cleft sentence

cleft sen·tence

C c

Definitions of cleft sentence words

noun cleft sentence a sentence in which a simpler sentence is paraphrased by being divided into two parts, each with its own verb, in order to emphasize certain information, especially a sentence beginning with expletive it and a form of be followed by the information being emphasized, as It was a mushroom that Alice ate instead of Alice ate a mushroom. 1
noun cleft sentence Also called pseudo-cleft sentence. a two-part sentence in which a subject or subject complement expresses information being emphasized and an indefinite relative clause corresponds to the rest of a simpler sentence that has been paraphrased, as A mushroom was what Alice ate or What Alice ate was a mushroom. 1
noun cleft sentence grammatical structure 1
noun cleft sentence (linguistics) A complex sentence whose meaning could be expressed by a simple sentence, and typically stressing a particular constituent, such as It's money that I love or It was from John that she heard the news. 0

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adjective

verb

adverb

pronoun

preposition

conjunction

determiner

exclamation

This term is known only to a narrow circle of people with rare knowledge. Only 5% of English native speakers know the meaning of this word.

According to our data most of word are more popular. This word is almost not used. It has a much more popular synonym.

This diagram is provided by Google Ngram Viewer

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