TENSE TUESDAY: CLEFT SENTENCES WITH 'WHAT'

Welcome back to The Daily Vitamin after our Semana Santa break! I hope everything went well for you.

Are you ready for some grammar with today's Tense Tuesday post? 

Today we are looking at CLEFT SENTENCES. A cleft sentence is a complex sentence that has a main clause and a dependent clause; a cleft sentence has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence, but cleft sentences help us express certain emphasis within the sentence. Here is the form we're looking at today.

what clause be noun phrase 

Example 1: What I love about Paris is the architecture.

Example 2: What I dislike about working late is getting home late. 

To understand how cleft sentences give emphasis, let's look at a sentence with and without them. 

Sentence 1: I'm here to talk about a promotion. 

And now look at the same sentence but as a CLEFT SENTENCE. 

Sentence 2: The reason I am here is to talk about a promotion. 

In our second sentence, we emphasise the noun phrase THE REASON. 

Let's look at another. 

Sentence 3: I like her positive attitude more than anything. 

Sentence 4: What I like most about her is her positive attitude. 

We can also invert cleft sentences. 

Sentence 5: Her positive attitude is what I like most about her. 

That's all for today. What I enjoy the most about Tense Tuesday is the opportunity to present grammar to our readers. But what I also love about Tense Tuesday is that it means tomorrow is Wordy Wednesday, which is fun.

We'll see you tomorrow, then, for a lesson on vocabulary!