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Information structure

📄️ Introduction

Sentences are not usually isolated for example what has been said before, or what is already known, or what the speaker or writer wants to emphasise. This is a complicated area of grammar in all languages. This Section looks at ways in which English allows speakers and writers to arrange information in sentences effectively, both by using normal sentence structure and by varying the normal order. The structure of longer texts and exchanges is looked at in Written text and Speech and spoken exchanges.

📄️ Cleft sentences: *It was my secretary who …*

We can emphasise particular words and expressions by putting everything into a kind of relative clause except the words we want to emphasise: this makes them stand out. These structures are called ‘cleft sentences’ by grammarians (cleft means ‘divided’). They are useful in writing (because we cannot use intonation for emphasis in written language), but they are also common in speech. The emphasis is often contrastive – to contradict a false belief or expectation.