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A cleft sentence has a corresponding non-cleft sentence, as in:

It was Tom that invented this. [cleft]

Tom invented this. [non-cleft]

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al.) presents a cleft sentence where the personal pronoun he is the subject instead of it (page 1384):

(1) He was a real genius that invented this. [cleft]

What's the corresponding non-cleft of (1)? Also, please provide some similar cleft sentence examples where a personal pronoun is used as subject instead of it.

Note that he is being used referentially.

EDIT

Some comments and an answer suggest that he is used non-referentially (i.e., it doesn't refer to a specific male). But I doubt such a reading. Quirk's CGEL lists two other examples along with (1) on page 1384:

[c) Subject pronouns other than it sometimes occur:

(No,) that was the doctor I was speaking to.

Those are my feet you're trending on.

He was a real genius that invented this.

Note that in the first two examples, it's clear that both that and those are used referentially. I think the very reason for using subject pronouns other than it is precisely because the speaker/write would like to make the subject referential.

So please provide an answer in line with this observation.

JK2
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    A real genius invented this? – Yosef Baskin Jun 03 '22 at 17:30
  • @YosefBaskin I'm afraid that doesn't contain any information about he. – JK2 Jun 03 '22 at 17:34
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    He, a real genius, invented this!!! – user 66974 Jun 03 '22 at 18:17
  • "It was Tom what invented this." – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jun 03 '22 at 20:08
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    What cleft rule are you following? It-cleft? Wh-cleft? All-cleft? There's lotsa types. – John Lawler Jun 03 '22 at 20:21
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    The sentence sounds a little weird to me, "it was a real genius that invented this" seems better. – Barmar Jun 03 '22 at 22:25
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    As per my understanding @YosefBaskin is right. In cleft sentences, the dependent clause is typically a placeholder which doesn't really refer to anything in particular. The "He" in the sentence that you're talking about doesn't point to anybody. It is corollary to saying "Man has been to moon" talks about mankind in general and not the male gender. The intended meaning of the sentence is that the one who invented this was a genius, thus the non-cleft will be "A genius invented this". – Shreyan Das Jun 04 '22 at 18:54
  • Re your edit, can you provide a context in which this would be used referentially because all those I think of seem unnatural - "He was a real genius who invented this" would be fine although I think people's opinions about the naturalness of "that" vary. (As an aside, it's not uncommon to group together different examples that don't all share the same properties, which can make reading books like the CGEL challenging because it doesn't fully explain the examples.) – Stuart F Jun 07 '22 at 10:58
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    The example sentence is not a cleft sentence. It was a real genius who invented that is a cleft sentence. The it is inserted by rule, and has no reference; it's a dummy. Other pronouns cannot be substituted ad lib; the pronoun hasta be it, just like It's raining. We don't say *He's raining because there's no rule to insert referential pronouns as dummies. If you want to see the various rules for clefts, start with this list – John Lawler Jun 07 '22 at 14:31
  • @JohnLawler Are you claiming that the other two examples starting with that and those are not cleft constructions? – JK2 Jun 07 '22 at 16:04
  • I think demonstratives work OK, but not personal pronouns. Those may follow a different rule from It-clefting or wh-clefting; a lot of cleavage has gone on in the past, and there are lots of possible constructions. – John Lawler Jun 07 '22 at 18:14
  • @JohnLawler Quirk's CGEL was published in 1985, and has since been considered one of the authorities on English grammar. If the he example was erroneously presented as a cleft sentence in the book, how come no one has objected to the example? – JK2 Jun 08 '22 at 01:55
  • I have no idea what Quirk might have had in mind. As for why nobody has objected, who says they haven't? Clefts are very odd constructions, and there is a great deal of work still to be done with them. Syntactic research is not conducted from grammars, but from syntactic data. – John Lawler Jun 08 '22 at 02:03
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    Thanks to this question, I now have a copy of Quirk's CGEL that I lugged home from the library. – shoover Jun 08 '22 at 05:01
  • He was a real genius that invented this does not fly at all in formal (American) English. From a spoken-English point of view, at best it's an elliptical version of something like He was a real genius — that guy who invented this. – Tinfoil Hat Jun 11 '22 at 02:52

2 Answers2

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Possibly "He, a real genius, invented this," though that isn't quite like the correspondent sentences offered in CGEL.

If we consider the sentence a type of cleft, then rephrasing the sentence in the straightforward manner it-clefts are rephrased ("A real genius invented this") results in lost information. Instead, one has to add more to make such a rephrased sentence semantically similar and thus "correspondent," though such an exercise may raise questions about correspondence.

For instance, there are 19th century legal examples of a cleft with personal pronoun quoted in Reppen, R., & Ädel, A. (2008). Corpora and Discourse : The Challenges of Different Settings, p. 259. (Google Books; I accessed via a university library.) Reppen and Ädel earlier (p. 244) cites Quirk's example as an example of a cleft with personal pronoun, so they think of these examples in the same vein:

(57) [$Mr Holroyde.$] Have you not said, that you were doubtful, whether in the confusion that took place during this melancholy scene, you yourself was not the person that did it? (Trials, Charles Angus 1800–1830)

(58) [$The ATTORNEY-GENERAL.$] Yes. In the Alresford circle you are a person that everybody knows? (Trials, Sir Roger Tichborne 1870–1900)

(59) [$Sir Charles Russell$] Yes. Was he a man that was rather given to exaggerate symptoms? (Trials, Edwin Maybrick 1870–1900)

(60) [$Q. (By MR. JUSTICE PARK.) $] Was she the lady who sat down on Mr. James Bowditch’s knee in your presence? (Trials, James Bowditch 1870–1900)

(61) [$Q.$] At any rate, you are the Mr Nichols who published the book that has been mentioned in court? (Trials, Adelaide Bartlett 1870–1900)

I'll point out two difficulties through using these examples.

If the pronoun is referential but the subsequent noun phrase doesn't repeat that information, then rephrasing isn't as straightforward as the it-cleft examples; one needs to add information lexically

(59) and (60) feature the use of the third person pronoun in a cleft formation as part of a question. A slight rephrasing of (59) will produce a cleft like your example:

(59b) He was a man that was rather given to exaggerate symptoms.

In this example, rephrasing is possible because the gender information of a man repeats the gender information in he:

(59c) A man was rather given to exaggerate symptoms.

In the original example you use ("He was a real genius that invented this"), a real genius lacks gender information. So a direct rephrasing would lose the gender information (1a). One could instead add a new lexeme to keep the gender element, possibly restructuring the syntax (1b and 1c):

(1a) A real genius invented this.

(1b) A real genius man invented this.

(1c) A male real genius invented this.

I would suggest that (1b) and (1c) should offer reflection on the notion that in rephrasing we are truly finding correspondent non-cleft sentences. The solution of adding a lexeme may add more than what was in the original. For instance, man may suggest an adult, but the original didn't indicate age. So (1) can't follow the straightforward correspondence seen in (59).

Sometimes rephrasing may require one to produce both the personal pronoun and the noun phrase to preserve that information

Consider (61), which I'll adapt as a statement for the sake of simplicity:

(61a) At any rate, you are the Mr Nichols who published the book that has been mentioned in court.

A basic rephrasing uses the information that this is an address in second person:

(61b) Mr. Nichols published the book that has been mentioned in court.

But only including you loses the semantic information of the name:

(61c) You published the book that has been mentioned in court.

One option would be to include both, one perhaps functioning as an address:

(61d) Mr. Nichols, you published the book that has been mentioned in court.

That element could also be moved around:

(61e) You, Mr. Nichols, published the book that has been mentioned in court.

(61f) You published the book that has been mentioned in court, Mr. Nichols.

A similar approach could be taken with the sentence in question:

(1c) He, a real genius, invented this.

This approach acknowledges that, unlike with the dummy it, the personal pronouns contain some semantic element that would be retained in a correspondent sentence. (1c) also avoids adding elements not in the original sentence. Whether Quirk had this, another correspondent, or no correspondent in mind is unknown, but (1c) at least provides an option for correspondence.

TaliesinMerlin
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  • I don't have access to the book you've cited, so I have no way of confirming your claim that (57)-(61) are presented in the book as cleft examples. But I find it hard to read them as cleft examples that are similar to Quirk's example. Rather, they all seem to contain prototypical relative clauses that combine with preceding antecedents. For example, in (57), the person that did it seems to form a noun phrase. (Note in the OP, a real genius that invented this does not form a noun phrase.) So I'd like you to double-check if they really are provided as cleft examples in the book. – JK2 Jun 08 '22 at 23:54
  • @JK2 Yes, they are presented as cleft examples. "The original structure of the it-cleft is naturally more frequent (71%, see Table 7) than its extensions. This is true both of the 19th-century data and the PresE material. The extensions of the pattern are mainly of two types: a demonstrative is used instead of it (the th-cleft, 15%, see Table 7) or a personal pronoun takes the place of it (14%, see Example (61) below)" (p. 258). Earlier in the chapter the Quirk example is described as "another extension of the original it-cleft pattern" (p. 244). – TaliesinMerlin Jun 09 '22 at 01:35
  • I cannot agree that (1c) can be a non-cleft candidate. The most important difference between (1) and its it-cleft version is that he refers to a particular person, which information is not conveyed by (1c). – JK2 Jun 12 '22 at 02:36
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If it is, what's the corresponding non-cleft?

He that/who invented this was a real genius.

Greybeard
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  • In your sentence, isn't he used non-referentially? – JK2 Jun 03 '22 at 23:43
  • Yes, I was following Quirk... – Greybeard Jun 04 '22 at 17:07
  • I don't understand. If you were following Quirk, please see the EDIT. – JK2 Jun 07 '22 at 07:37
  • @JK2 (i) Your words are But I doubt such a reading - I don't. (ii) Quirk's examples are just that - had he wished to make a distinction, he would have done. – Greybeard Jun 07 '22 at 10:58
  • In Quirk's three examples, two use demonstratives that and those instead of it. Are you claiming that those demonstratives are used non-referentially? If not, Quirk would have made a distinction if he had intended he to be used non-referentially. – JK2 Jun 13 '22 at 02:52