Pseudo-cleft

In the pseudo-cleft construction, like the cleft construction, some part X of a sentence is focussed.

Example

(ii) is a pseudo-cleft version of (i). The focussed part X (a herring) is associated with a free relative clause in a copula construction:

(i)  John ate a herring
(ii) [What John ate e] was a herring

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Smits, R.J.C. 1989. The relative and cleft constructions of the Germanic and Romance languages, doct. diss. KUB, Tilburg, Dordrecht: Foris, 1988.

STUB