On the Syntax of the It-Cleft Construction

The English it-cleft construction displays ambivalent structural properties: restrictive relative clause and non-relative clause properties. This paper reviews its main grammatical properties and then sketches a uniform analysis for different types of the construction. This direction departs from the traditional ternary analysis in which the copula takes two complements, focus and cleft clause. In this paper, we suggest that the copula be in the cleft, as in other canonical environments, projects a binary structure, forming a cleft construction. This way of viewing the it-cleft construction as forming an independent grammatical entity brings us several welcoming consequences.