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Cleft Sentence for Focus

Clefts function to give prominence to a particular part of a sentence. They do this by splitting the sentence into two clauses (hence the name ‘cleft’ from ‘cleave’) and assigning a verb to each noun phrase. The sentence can be cleft by using wh-words, expletive - It, and sometimes with phrase like ‘all that’. The part of the clause to be emphasised can be subject; subject complement; direct object of verb; verb phrase; adverbial phrase; adjective phrase; infinitive phrase; gerund phrase; complement phrase/clause of adjective and verb; noun phrase with noun + complement; subordinate clause and the clause itself.

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