Linguist Forum

Specializations => Morphosyntax => Topic started by: mallu on March 14, 2016, 01:19:00 PM

Title: Clefting a sentence
Post by: mallu on March 14, 2016, 01:19:00 PM

See the following sentence
1)Mary gave birth to Jesus
Now I would like to cleft the sentence
2)It was Mary who gave birth to Jesus.
Is this sentence unnatural due to any semantic anomaly ?
Hoping someone would help
Thanks in advance

Title: Re: Clefting a sentence
Post by: Daniel on March 17, 2016, 07:37:55 PM

(2) emphasizes Mary rather than someone else (not Jane). It's a little unusual because most people know Mary is the mother of Jesus, but other than that, it's normal.