Virtual presents and cleft sentences

Wow! Your pictures are gorgeous Jihad!

Thank you so much for the virtual picnic; it’s a lovely birthday present. Al-Azhar Park looks beautiful and is definitely on my list of places to visit! I also really liked the pictures of the city skyline, with palm trees and minarets and a pinkish-apricot-coloured sky.

Thank you!

Now, after that very pleasant virtual picnic, let’s get back to work! One of the blog readers (Abdisamad Sharif, from Kampala, Uganda) asked about ‘I’ in the middle of a sentence so I’ll make cleft sentences the topic for today. A cleft sentence is a sentence that has been divided into two clauses and re-arranged. Cleft sentences are a way of providing variety in your writing and also a way of focussing your readers’ attention on a new or important bit of information.

So what do cleft sentences look like? Let’s start with a sentence from your last post Jihad, as follows:

I am going to give you a virtual birthday present.

OK, we can re-arrange this sentence in (for example) the following three ways:

It’s a virtual birthday present that I’m going to give you.

What I’m going to do is give you a virtual birthday present.

The thing I’m going to give you is a virtual birthday present.

Let’s have a look at those sentences in a bit more detail. The first example:

It’s a virtual birthday present that I’m going to give you.

…is a typical it-cleft structure, with the focus on the final element of the it-clause (virtual birthday present), the object of the main verb give.

The second sentence:

What I’m going to do is give you a virtual birthday present.

… is an example of a wh-cleft sentence (usually what, other question words are more likely to be expressed by nouns such as: the person, the place, the way used in a front position). Wh-cleft sentences put the focus on the end of the clause. The information in the wh-clause (what I’m going to do is) is either old, or already understood in the context, and the information that is new, or which we want to emphasise, is in the copula complement (give you a virtual birthday present).

Finally, the third sentence:

The thing I’m going to give you is a virtual birthday present.

… is another type of cleft sentence, this time beginning with the thing, one thing, or something. Again, this structure is a way of emphasising the second part of the sentence, the copula complement (a virtual birthday present).

There’s a really good explanation of the structure and use of cleft sentences on this BBC LE page:

Cleft sentences

I hope I haven’t given you a headache with all this sentence structure information, but if I have, there is a lovely park nearby where you can go for a relaxing walk!

OK, that’s it for today. Thanks again for the lovely photos. They’re unforgettable!

Rachel

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Comments on the comments:

Ana Paula - I’m glad to hear that you have a messy desk too! Actually, although our desks may look messy to other people, they actually represent a highly organised and efficient system that is understood only by ourselves….right??!!

Thanks to everyone for your birthday wishes. I had a really lovely week!

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