it-cleft: b. Japanese The X no wa (ga) construction in Japanese is frequently used to produce the equivalent of cleft sentences. In addition, a gap precedes its filler in both subject cleft (SC) constructions and object cleft (OC) constructions. Japanese speakers have reported that there is an object gap preference in Japanese cleft constructions due to temporal structural ambiguities in subject clefts. Example: Example of a subject cleft construction: Example of an object cleft construction: Goidelic languages The construction is frequent in the Goidelic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Manx), much more so than in English, and can be used in ways that would be ambiguous or ungrammatical in English: almost any element of a sentence can be clefted. This sometimes carries over into the local varieties of English (Highland English, Lowland Scots, Scottish English, Hiberno-English). The following examples from Scottish Gaelic are based on the sentence , "Iain heard the music last night": ("It's Iain who heard the music last night" e.g. as opposed to Mary) ("It's the music that Iain heard last night" e.g. as opposed to the speech) ("It's last night that Iain heard the music" e.g. as opposed to last week) ("It's heard that Iain the music last night" e.g. as opposed to making the music) Tagalog Cleft sentences are copula constructions in which the focused element serves as the predicate of the sentence. In the examples in (1) and (2), the foci are in bold. The remaining portions of the cleft sentences in (1) and (2) are noun phrases that contain headless relative clauses. (NB: Tagalog does not have an overt copula.) This construction is also used for WH-questions in Tagalog, when the WH-word used in the question is either sino "who" or ano "what", as illustrated in (3) and (4). Notes References Akmajian, A. 1970. On deriving cleft sentences from pseudo-cleft sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 1(149-168). Bolinger, D. 1972. A Look at Equations and Cleft Sentences. In Firchow, E., editor, Studies for Einar Haugen, pages 96–114. Mouton de Gruyter, The Hague. Borkin, A. 1984. Problems in Form and Function. Ablex, Norwood, NJ. Bresnan, J. and Grimshaw, J. (1978). The Syntax of Free Relatives in English. Linguistic Inquiry, 9:331–391. Calude, Andreea S. 2009. Cleft Constructions in Spoken English. VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, Saarbrücken. Chomsky, N. 1977. On wh-movement. In Culicover, P., Wasow, T., and Akmajian, A., editors, Formal Syntax, pages 71–132. Academic Press, New York. Collins,