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It's in London that he met his wife - I've got this sentence in my grammar book under cleft sentences. It's just one of many.

I was wondering if it's possible to use to be verb (I've got no single example). It's from London that I am. Would that be correct?

I know it's not how people usually say something like that but I'm asking about cleft sentences and the way they work

Dunno
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    It is not grammatically incorrect, but as you surmise, it is quite an awkward sentence. I would say it's grammatically dubious: there is no real rule that prohibits it, but it is so uncommon and rare that it is likely to be fairly jarring to any native speaker. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 10 '13 at 11:47
  • @JanusBahsJacquet How about it's my wife I'm worried about? – Dunno Nov 10 '13 at 11:50
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    "It's my wife I'm worried about" is fine. "It's from London that I am" is grammatically questionable. – Peter Shor Nov 10 '13 at 11:52
  • @PeterShor Oops the wife sentence is a bit different. I meant something like It's with my wife that I'm angry. and It's about the tv show she's crazy Are these correct? – Dunno Nov 10 '13 at 12:15
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    Those are both stilted and not very natural, but not as jarring as “It’s from London that I am”. When there's a predicative after the copula, it works; when the predicative is the bit that's fronted by cleaving the sentence, things start to get shaky. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 10 '13 at 12:58
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    Yoda might say It's from Dagobah that I am, but most of the rest of us would say it not. – bib Nov 10 '13 at 17:39
  • Ending a clause with am is very jarring. It's virtually always contracted with the pronoun to form *I'm, which can't appear finally. And it's never meaningful, so it shouldn't be moved to the focussed final position by clefting, which is for getting important* constituents at the beginning and end, where they're in focus. And the trouble was caused by pied-piping the from of be from (the idiom referring to place of origin) away from after am, where it identifies the idiom, to the beginning of the clause, where it obscures it. Way too much unnecessary syntax here. – John Lawler Nov 10 '13 at 18:53
  • @JohnLawler, I wouldn’t say that ending a clause with am is jarring per se. There are plenty of cases where doing so is not only perfectly natural, but required: “That’s the kind of man I am”, “I have no idea where I am”, etc. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 21 '13 at 00:08

2 Answers2

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English has two be’s, equative and predicative, and both of them seem uniformly to be bad with it-clefts. Compare:

Noun phrase:

Susan is president / a president / the president.

?? It’s (a/the) president that Susan is.

Adjective:

Susan is horsy.

?? It’s horsy that Susan is.

Prepositional phrase:

Susan is under the table.

?? It’s under the table that Susan is.

And for something truly appalling, a wh-phrase:

Susan is who you should ask.

?? It’s who you should ask that Susan is.

This seems to be a fact about the interaction of it-clefts with be, rather than just be by itself though, as many of these sentences are fine with wh-clefts; for instance:

What Susan is is the president.

What Susan is is horsy.

Where Susan is is under the table.

My guess is some clever linguist specializing in the semantics of it-clefts will have to unravel this nice catch of a conundrum.

Community
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Daniel Harbour
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It is an interesting question. I tried to give a comment on this, but for some reason, I can not post it above.

I think the following expressions could be alternative ways for them.

It's London where he met his wife. It's London where I am from.

I am not sure that those are cleft sentences (maybe not), but you can put some stress on London more than the plain expressions--he met his wife in London, and I am from London.

Pawan
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