The Grammaring Guide to English Grammar with Exercises

Cleft sentences

IT + BE + PHRASE + DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSE

Cleft sentences (also called it-clefts) result from changing the normal sentence pattern to emphasise a particular piece of information. The emphasis in the resulting cleft sentence is on the phrase after it + be.

Look at the following example:

János Irinyi invented the non-explosive match in 1836.

We can transform this sentence in different ways depending on which part of it we want to bring into focus:

It was János Irinyi who/that

invented the non-explosive match in 1836.

It was the non-explosive match which/that/(-)

János Irinyi invented in 1836.

It was 1836 when

János Irinyi invented the non-explosive match.

In the clauses that follow it + be + phrase, we can use the same relative pronouns (who, whom, whose, which, that) and relative adverbs (where, when, why) that we normally use in defining relative clauses.

However, if we bring a whole adverbial phrase into focus, we use that:

It was in 1836 that

János Irinyi invented the non-explosive match.

If we use a personal pronoun after it + be, it will be in the object form:

It was him who

invented the non-explosive match in 1836.

It is also possible to expand the phrase in focus with a non-defining relative clause:

It was János Irinyi,

who was a Hungarian chemist

, that invented the non-explosive match in 1836.

Quotes:

The fishing was good; it was the catching that was bad. - A. K. Best

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not. - Hanoch McCarty

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. - Marlene Dietrich

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last. - William Barret

Related topics:

Defining relative clause