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Cleft sentence
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=== Wh-cleft/Pseudo-cleft === In English, pseudo-clefts consist of an interrogative clause in the subject position, followed by a form of the verb ''be'', followed by the focused element that appears at the end of the sentence.<ref name="Sportiche">{{Cite book |first=Dominique |last=Sportiche |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/861536792 |title=An introduction to syntactic analysis and theory |isbn=978-1-118-47048-0 |oclc=861536792}}</ref> The prototypical pseudo-cleft construction uses ''what'', while other [[Interrogative word|wh-words]] like ''who'', ''where'' etc. and their [[pro-form]] equivalents like ''thing'', ''one'', ''place'' etc. are used less frequently.<ref name="Collins">{{cite book | last = Collins | first = Peter Craig | title = Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English | year = 2002 | orig-date = 1991 |edition = 1st | location = London | publisher = Routledge | page = 27{{ndash}}28 | isbn = 978-0203202463 | quote = Frequencies for the different relative clause types in the corpus are presented in Table 3.1, which shows that the prototypical pseudo-cleft with relative clause introduced by ''what'' is statistically dominant, and that the fused-type is almost three times as common as the lexically-headed type.}}</ref> Pseudo-clefts are tools for presenting and highlighting new information, serving as the building blocks of a coherent discourse progression, and a rhetorical toolkit to construct an authorial stance, being a grammatical resource for making evaluative meaning.{{vague|date=March 2023}}<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Zhou |first1=Hui |last2=Chen |first2=Ming |date=2021-05-28 |title=What Still Needs to be Noted: Pseudo-Clefts in the Academic Discourse of Applied Linguistics |journal=Frontiers in Psychology |volume=12 |pages=672349 |doi=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672349 |issn=1664-1078 |pmc=8194822 |pmid=34122267|doi-access=free }}</ref> * '''English wh-cleft/pseudo-cleft:''' ''What Mary bought was a first edition.''<ref name="Sportiche" />
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