TENSE TUESDAY: CLEFT SENTENCES WITH 'WHAT'
TENSE TUESDAY: CLEFT SENTENCES WITH 'WHAT': meaning and examples
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!