On the Role of Cohesion and Inference in the It-is-that Construction

English allows the pronoun it to be used in various contexts. This paper looks into the so-called It-is-that construction whose formal properties have received not much attention. This paper first identifies total 115 corpus examples of the construction and then reviews its grammatical properties including semantic and pragmatic properties. The paper argues that the construction is basically introduced to establish a `cohesion relationship between the construction with preceding discourse and further to evoke an `inference relationship linking the preceding context with the that clause.