sentences with a verb and direct object but no explicitly stated subject. In questions, VSO is usual (though not obligatory): = "Did my friend write the book?" Yes/no questions, regardless of constituent order, are generally distinguished from declarative sentences by context and intonation. Cleft sentences A cleft sentence is one formed with the copular verb (generally with a dummy pronoun like "it" as its subject), plus a word that "cleaves" the sentence, plus a subordinate clause. They are often used to put emphasis on a part of the sentence. Here are some examples of English sentences and their cleft versions: "I did it." → "It was I who did it" or colloquially "It was me that did it." "You will stop smoking through willpower." → "It is through willpower that you will stop smoking." Spanish does not usually employ such a structure in simple sentences. The translations of sentences like these can be readily analyzed as being normal sentences containing relative pronouns. Spanish is capable of expressing such concepts without a special cleft structure thanks to its flexible word order. For example, if we translate a cleft sentence such as "It was Juan who lost the keys", we get Whereas the English sentence uses a special structure, the Spanish one does not. The verb has no dummy subject, and the pronoun is not a cleaver but a nominalising relative pronoun meaning "the [male] one that". Provided we respect the pairings of "" and "", we can play with the word order of the Spanish sentence without affecting its structure – although each permutation would, to a native speaker, give a subtly different shading of emphasis. For example, we can say ("Juan was the one who lost the keys") or ("The one who lost the keys was Juan"). As can be seen from the translations, if this word order is chosen, English stops using the cleft structure (there is no more dummy "it" and a nominalising relative is used instead of the cleaving word) whilst in Spanish no words have changed. Here are some examples of such sentences: = "It was John who lost the keys" = "It is only three days that you have left" = "It will be I who tells him" = lit. "There are few who come and stay" Note that it is ungrammatical to try to use just to cleave such sentences as in English, but