Random thoughts on that and wh-words in it-clefts

A couple of years ago I posted a lesson on cleft sentences where I said:

The structure is:

It is / was + emphasised noun phrase + who / that / when + rest of the sentence

Notice that the use of pronouns is the same as in defining relative clauses:

• who or that for people
• that (NOT which) for things and after prepositional phrases
• As in defining relative clauses, who and that can be left out when they refer to the object or the object of a preposition.

I'll quickly gloss over the fact that I compared using that and not which to the use of pronouns in defining relative clauses (where, of course, we can use which, despite the naysayers).

The problem was that a commenter, a certain elhamcz, had noticed that while I had ruled out which for things, one of the resources I had linked to included it in their list of allowable pronouns, and not surprisingly elhamcz was rather confused. Furthermore elhamcz wanted to know what other relative pronouns or wh-words, for example whom and where, could be used in it-clefts, and whether there were any sources that could provide an answer to this problem.

Now I am neither a linguist nor a grammar expert, and had based my lesson on EFL grammars that I use regularly, but I wondered if perhaps I was being too categorical in dismissing which for things, and should I have included when? Anyway, I decided to have a root around.

Fronting exercises (with a bit of subject-verb inversion)

These ten exercises are intended to give students some pretty intensive practice in fronting. They cover the more common forms of fronting, and include basic instructions on how it is done. For more detail on how they are formed and why we use fronting you could have a look at my post on 'Exploring Inversion and fronting' (link at the bottom).

Emphasis - Focussing with cleft sentences

We sometimes use constructions called cleft sentences when we want to focus on a particular part of the sentence. These are used both in written and spoken English.

There are two main types of cleft sentence, it- clefts and what- clefts (and a variation of what-clefts, all-clefts). What- clefts and variations on them are often referred to as pseudo clefts.

Read all about clefts and try some exercises.

Emphatic do, does, did and other auxiliaries.

A quick look at how we stress auxiliaries to add emphasis.
Now with exercises.