Emphatic Structure

This is another smart and fast way to give an impression over the control of your grammar. I’ve seen just a few students using this technique in their answer.

Sometime to emphasize and sometime, perhaps to contradict what someone else has said or for dramatic effect, we use emphatic sentence structure.

We do this either by splitting one sentence into two parts (cleft sentences) or by bringing the element we want to emphasize to the beginning (fronting), and inversion techniques.

This is used in writing and speaking.

1. Cleft sentence

 ‘Cleft’ means divided. In a cleft sentence, information which could be given in one clause is divided into two parts, each with its own verb:-

This gives extra emphasis to technology. We often use this pattern to emphasise some piece of new information, to give explanations or to make a contrast with a previous statement (the emphasized information is in bold). There are two ways to do this:-

1. Using it cleft sentences
   1. Using wh cleft

It cleft

We can use this pattern to emphasise the subject or the object of a simple sentence, or an adverbial phrase, or a prepositional phrase:-

**Note: We cannot use it clefts to highlight the action or a verb complement in a sentence. We use wh- clefts to do this.

Wh- cleft sentences

We can use this pattern to highlight the action in a sentence. For example, if we want to highlight

2. FRONTING

Fronting objects and complements

In Spoken and Written English we sometimes want to make a strong contrast with something in a previous statement. We can do this with objects and complements by ‘fronting’ them (moving them to the front of the clause), which makes them more emphatic:-

Fronting adjective phrases; also and such

When we want to start a sentence with known information or we want to make an emphatic comparison with information in a previous sentence, we can use a comparative or superlative phrase at the beginning. We use a form of the verb be followed by the subject :

Fronting adverbials and infinitives; as and though

We can put known information at the beginning of a sentence by putting adverbial phrases describing position or place (e.g. At the back of the house), verbs of position and movement (e.g. stand, attach, lie) and to + infinitive forms in the front position, with inversion of the subject and verb be:-

INVERSION

subject-verb inversion

We sometimes put a verb or verb phrase in front of the subject after adverbs of place (e.g. on, in, here, there, outside, opposite) and adverbs of time (e.g. next, then, first, now, finally). We can use a form of be or verbs of place and movement (e.g. stand, sit, lie, come, go, climb, run. sail, fly) before the subject. We often use this pattern to form a link with the information in the previous sentence, and it is common in formal English:-

Subject-auxiliary inversion

We sometimes put an auxiliary (do. have, should, can, etc.) before the subject in statements; the rest of the verb phrase follows the subject. We use this pattern of inversion for emphasis in the following cases:-