involved: the traditionalists claim it to be a relative clause (Huddleston and Pullum 2002), while others reject this on the basis of a lack of noun phrase antecedent (Quirk et al. 1985, Sornicola 1988, Miller 1999), as exemplified below: It was because he was ill that we decided to return. It was in September that he first found out about it. It was with great reluctance that Maria accepted the invitation. Finally, the last element of a cleft is the cleft constituent, which typically corresponds to the focus. As mentioned earlier, the focused part of a cleft is typically a noun phrase, but may in fact, turn up to be just about anything: Prepositional phrase: It was on foot that he went there. Adverbial phrase: It was greedily and speedily that Homer Simpson drank his beer. Non-finite clause: It is to address a far-reaching problem that Oxfam is launching this campaign. Gerund: It could be going home early or slacking off at work that the boss reacted to. Adverbial clause: It was because she was so lonely all the time that she decided to move out. Information structure Clefts have been described as "equative" (Halliday 1976), "stative" (Delin and Oberlander 1995) and as "variable-value pairs", where the cleft constituent gives a variable expressed by the cleft clause (Herriman 2004, Declerck 1994, Halliday 1994). A major area of interest with regard to cleft constructions involves their information structure. The concept of "information structure" relates to the type of information encoded in a particular utterance, that can be one of these three: NEW information: things that the speaker/writer expects their hearer/reader might not already know GIVEN information: information that the speaker/writer expects the hearer/reader may be familiar with INFERRABLE information: information that the speaker/writer may expect the hearer/reader to be able to infer either from world knowledge, or from previous discourse The reason why information structure plays such an important role in the area of clefts is largely due to the fact that the organisation of information structure is tightly linked to the clefts' function as focusing tools used by speakers/writers to draw attention to salient parts of their message. While it may be reasonable to assume that the variable of a cleft (that is, the material encoded by cleft clauses) may be typically GIVEN and its value (expressed by the cleft constituent) is NEW, it is not always so. Sometimes, neither