Lecture 17: Emphatic Sentences

17.1 What is an emphatic sentence?

Introduction

• Emphasis in spoken language: expressing emphasis through tone and phonetic stress;
• In writing, English can use a cleft sentence to give one element special focus;
• An it-cleft contains a clause resembling a relative clause, but its function is different: it divides information into a focused element and a background clause;

Basic Sentence Patterns

• Basic structure: It is… that…
• Example:
• I love you. -> It is I who love you. -> Emphasizes that the person who loves you is me;
• I love you. -> It is you that I love. -> Emphasize that you are the one I love;
• Focus: the element between It is/was and that/who;
• Background: the clause introduced by that or who;

Note: A cleft normally focuses a noun phrase or an adjunct phrase/clause. An adjective immediately after It is often signals an extraposed subject clause instead;

Examples

• We hear the more honest argument only in recent years -> It is only in recent years that we hear the more honest argument…

17.2 Variations in emphatic sentences

Variations in Emphatic Sentences

• Structure: It is/was… that/who…
• Present-time focus: It is...
• Emphasize past events: It was...
• Generally, don't emphasize future events; if you do, use It is...
• that is widely used; who is also possible when the focused element refers to a person;

Examples

• It is they, not America, who have become anti-intellectual.
• It was not until the 19 th century that the newspaper became the dominant pre-electronic medium...
• Past matters, using It was;
• Emphasizing time: not until the 19th century
• It was only after I started to write a weekly column about the medical journals, and began to read scientific papers from beginning to end, that I realised just how bad much of the medical literature was.
• Here, It was is used to indicate past events;
• Highlights:
• The focused element is the long time adjunct beginning with only after;

17.3 Emphatic Sentences and Postposed Subject Clauses

Judgment: Is it an emphatic sentence?

• Method 1: Reduction Method
• Remove the It is/was ... that/who ... frame and reconstruct the remaining words. If they form the corresponding complete proposition, the sentence is a cleft;
• Example: It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of the word garden...
• Removing the cleft frame yields: This implicit or explicit reference to nature fully justifies the use of the word garden...;
• Method 2: Elimination method
• If an adjective after It is evaluates the following that-clause, the structure is usually extraposition rather than a cleft;
• Example: It is worrisome that society is medicalizing more and more behavioral problems...
• worrisome is an adjective -> is postposed as a subject clause;

17.4 Summary

17.4.1 Knowledge Summary

Subjunctive mood: expresses hypotheticals, counterfactuals, wishes, or demands

• 1. Counterfactual if-clauses
• 2. Mandative subjunctive in noun clauses

Inversion

• 1. All inverted (focus on mastering the There Be sentence pattern);
• 2. Partial inversion (the negative word /only is at the beginning of the sentence; if is omitted in the conditional sentence);

Cleft emphasis

• Structure and variation of emphatic sentences: It is/was... That/who...
• The difference between emphatic clauses and subject clauses;

17.4.2 Requirements for three sentence patterns

1. Able to understand;
2. Able to write inverted sentences and emphasized sentences in writing;