Cleft sentences are used to help us focus on a particular part of the sentence and to emphasise what we want to say by introducing it or building up to it with a kind of relative clause.

Cleft construction “designed” for focussing one XP of a clause is used in the sentence above to mark the whole clause as focussed. The effect is achieved by extracting the usual topic of a sentence – ...

After completing a B.A in Psychology, Dr. Hedberg received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Minnesota, with a dissertation on Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English. Prior to ...