Normal sentence structure : John was the one who scratched your car, not me.
Cleft sentence : The one who scratched your car was John, not me.
Who scratched your car was John, not me.
Can I omit "the one" like in the last exam?
Can we combine so-that with cleft sentence? As in
"I am so stupid that it is I that make lots of mistakes."
I have a hard time distinguishing between those two structures when after the complement there's a that or wh- clause. For example in sentences like:
"It was at school where I learned how to write".
If this was a case of anticipatory it, I could write it as "Where I learned how to write was at school", which sounds weird and perhaps is not even correct. But I could also write it as "I learned to write at school" which gives the impression that the sentence is a cleft sentece.
For example, when you run into a sentence like this:
It was the cake that Tom ate.
a) What Tome ate was the cake.
b) It was the cake. Tom ate the cake.
Without any context, is there any way to decide which one is correct?
I thought it could be ambiguous.
Thanks!
https://preview.redd.it/4eggcb396jq41.png?width=468&format=png&auto=webp&s=14fabe441e4ffdb87375f1776e9eb0f051a2d7e0
The sentence:
>It is often said that technological progress is important.
Is this considered a "cleft sentence?"
So I am a little confused about this point. Here:
What I did was buy a car. What I did was to buy a car.
To me the 2nd sentence sounds strange. I understand why 'to' is being used I suppose.
What are your thoughts on this?
What I should do is study.
What I should do is to study.
Can you tell me if I get the idea of using "that" in it-cleft sentences? Here are my exmples:
It was in my childhood that I met her the first time.
It was back in the days that I used to play footbal every evening.
It was a week ago that I went to the cinema.
I'm trying to wrap my head around how, grammatically, a sentence like this functions:
"It is strange that you don't like pizza."
In this construction, "It" is the subject, "is" is the verb, and "strange" is an adjective.
The clause "that you don't like pizza" must be a noun clause. However, I don't see what slot it takes, as it doesn't have anything connecting it to the rest of the sentence. The clause seems more to be attached to "strange" as an adverbial or relative clause, but neither of those make sense.
Englishgrammar.org seems to address this, but their explanation seems inadequate to me:
"If the subject is too long, it may be difficult for the reader to understand the sentence. To solve this problem, we usually use the introductory ‘it’. In this case, ‘it’ will occupy the position of the subject, but it is not the real subject. It merely signals that a noun-clause is to follow.
Ex: It surprised me that he was still in bed."
"It is not the real subject" doesn't explain anything from a grammatical standpoint. How exactly would one diagram or parse out a construction like this?
I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.
Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.
Intro of my essay: A ruthless emotion, fear is helplessly contagious. It was the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor which plagued the country of America with immense fear toward any citizen of Japanese descent.
For the draft, my professor commented “comma rules” on the first sentence and “fragment” on the second. I can understand that the second sentence is an incomplete thought and was thinking maybe I could use a colon to connect the two sentences. But i have absolutely no idea what’s wrong with the first sentence. Any help is appreciated:)
Do your worst!
I'm surprised it hasn't decade.
For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.
I said "hey look, an escaPEA"
No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!
Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂
It really does, I swear!
They’re on standbi
Pilot on me!!
Nothing, he was gladiator.
Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.
This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.
If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.
Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.
What did 0 say to 8 ?
" Nice Belt "
So What did 3 say to 8 ?
" Hey, you two stop making out "
When I got home, they were still there.
I won't be doing that today!
[Removed]
This morning, my 4 year old daughter.
Daughter: I'm hungry
Me: nerves building, smile widening
Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.
She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.
Thank you all for listening.
There hasn't been a post all year!
You take away their little brooms
It’s pronounced “Noel.”
