It was Julia who phoned us.

Whereas in most clauses the information that comes at the end is what i new or important, in cleft sentences we put what is already known at thi end (e.g. someone phoned us). What is new and important comes immediately after It is, It was etc. - and this is what is under the 'spotlight' (e.g. Julia). This spotlighted information can take the form of many types of sentence constituent (subject, adverbial etc.).

subject:	It was	Julia	…who phoned us on Saturday.
adverbial:	It was	on Saturday	…that Julia phoned us.
direct object:	It was	us	…that Julia phoned on Saturday.
indirect object:	Was it	Mary	…that you gave the file to?
subordinate clause:	It was	in order to cheer up Julia	…that we phoned them.

Because it comes at the end of the sentence, the information that follows who or that is also prominent even though it is not new information.

6. Question word + information + be + spotlighted information (‘pseudo-clefting’)

We use pseudo-clefting in a very similar way to clefting, again turning the spotlight on a particular part of a clause in order to draw attention to the information it conveys. We usually begin the adapted (i.e. pseudo- cleft) clause with a question word (e.g. what, where) and we introduce the spotlighted information at the end with a form of the verb to be such as is, was, has been or will be.

As in the case of clefting, this spotlighted information can take the form of many types of sentence constituent (subject, adverbial etc.):

subject:	What drove us crazy was…	…the noise
adverbial:	When you may see him is…	…on Sunday.
direct object:	What he needs is…	..a good shake-up.
indirect object:	Who you should really give the gardening prize to is …	…the person with the bestwindow boxes
complement:	What she really feels is …	…profound disappointment.
subordinate:	Why we came late is…	… because we had to finish the work ourselves.

We can normally reverse the order of the two parts of a pseudo-cleft sentence:

What drove us crazy was the noise.

The noise was what drove us crazy.

7. Flexibility: adverbials

We generally teach that adverbials come at the end of the clause (e.g. I'll be there on Saturday). We also teach that they can be fronted (e.g. On Saturday I'll be there).

Although we may choose not to teach students to use adverbials in other sentence positions, we need to be aware that adverbial expressions can occur in a variety of intermediate positions (after the verb phrase or even within it).

subject	verb phrase	adverbial	complement
That	Is	on the whole	an excellent idea

subject	auxiliary verb	adverbial	past participle	object
I	have	on occasions	eaten	raw fish.

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