Cleft version of "Tim has not had a car for a long time"

Question

My intuitive feeling is that the following cleft versions of the sentence Tim has not had a car for a long time are all correct (more or less) :

1) It is a long time since Tim last had a car.
2) It has been a long time since Tim last had a car.
3) It is a long time since Tim has no longer had a car.
4) It has been a long time since Tim has no longer had a car.

But one of my pupils has come up with the following :

5) It has been a long time that Tom no longer has a car,

and this version does not seem acceptable to me - at least in formal register.

Could anyone explain to me exactly why it is so and - if at all possible - direct me to any grammar or usage guide that gives the precise rules that govern that sort of usage?

Judging from sentence 5), I guess it is "that" or/and the present simple form in the second part of the sentence that is/are at fault. But I cannot tell which of the two makes 5) so odd. Perhaps it it both. I confess that I am not too sure whether the following sentences are acceptable. 6) and 6') seem borderline to me, and I would tend to think that 7) and 7') are definitely ungrammatical. Do you share my point of view?

6) It is a long time that Tim has no longer had a car.
6') It has been a long time that Tim has no longer had a car.

7) It is a long time since Tim no longer has a car.
7') It has been a long time since Tim since no longer has a car

Many thanks for any help you could provide me with.

Fivejedjon · Accepted Answer

stephen2221) It is a long time since Tim last had a car.2) It has been a long time since Tim last had a car.

These are fine.

stephen2223) It is a long time since Tim has no longer had a car.4) It has been a long time since Tim has no longer had a car.

These are not natural. If we use more straightforward word order, we can say:

Tim no longer has a car,
Tim hasn't had a car for a long time,

But not: ~~Tim has no longer had a car (for a long time~~)

stephen2225) It has been a long time that Tom no longer has a car,

Once again, we don't mix 'no longer' and the present perfect.

Stephen222 · Answer

Thanks for that, fivejedjon.
My pupil happens to be an educated, articulate speaker of English.
The sentence wrote occurred in a translation, and the original sentence meant that:
a) Tim once had a car; b) He no longer has one; c) The situation expressed in b) has been true for years.
It is probably because my student tried to combine the meaning of b) and c) and because she sensed that a present perfect form would not do after 'no longer' that she somehow got muddled up and ended up with the curious sentence I posted above.
Many thanks for your help.

BillJ · Answer

Stephen222: why are you calling your examples 'clefts'?

BillJ

Stephen222 · Answer

BillJ : Because they meet the definition of cleft sentences, although thery are not traditonal instances of what is usually referred to by that term. They are 'complex sentences that have a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence' and 'put a particular constituent into focus'. (Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleft_sentence; http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsACleftSentence.htm)

BillJ · Answer

stephen222BillJ : Because they meet the definition of cleft sentences, although thery are not traditonal instances of what is usually referred to by that term. They are 'complex sentences that have a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence' and 'put a particular constituent into focus'.

But they don't meet any of the criteria for an it-cleft construction. I dealt with this just the other day. Here's a link to the thread; note the crucial structural criteria:

BillJ

Stephen222 · Answer

Hello again BillJ,

I have had a look at your most interesting post on the other tread.
In the present case, my sentences certainly do not meet all the criteria for traditional it-cleft constructions, but I would not go so far as to say that they do not meet any.

Assuming we have a ‘basic’, non-cleft construction with an adjunct of duration, like
[1a] Tom has not had a job for years,

a canonical it-cleft construction would no doubt be ungrammatical in a sentence with adjunct focalization:
[1b] *It is for years that Tom has not had a job.

In [1c], however, we do have the ‘basic version’ divided into two parts, one part being foregrounded while the other is backgrounded:

[1c] It is years since Tim has not had a job.

What makes it uncanonical is
a) that the traditional IT + BE + [X] THAT + [Y] construction is replaced by the unusual IT + BE + [X] SINCE + [Y] pattern;
b) that the focalized element does not occur as a PP in the ‘cleft’ version, but as a NP.

[1c] would of course not qualify as a cleft sentence if one maintains that such constructions always feature a that-clause which turns out to be a relative clause (introduced by the relative "that" which has the focalized element as antecedent).
But is that really the case?

Substituting WHICH or Ø for THAT in sentences like [1d] or [1e] suggests that it is so:
[1d] It was Tom that replied to me. => [1d’] It was Tom who replied to me.
[1e] It wasn’t me that Tom was suspicious of. => [1e’] It wasn’t me Ø Tom was suspicious of.

But this kind of substitution is no longer acceptable when the focalized element is not argumental, but circumstantial:
[1f] It is only then that/*which/*Ø Tom realised that he was lost.

WHICH and Ø would be ungrammatical here, and so would WHEN, but the meaning of THAT is much closer to that of WHEN, which is a complementizer, than to that of the relative pronouns.

That is why some linguists wonder if that is not something of a hybrid word in in it-cleft constructions. Whereas it seems to be a relative pronoun in sentences where the focalized element is an argument, it tends to be a complementizer in constructions where it is an adjunct.

Which brings us back to [1c], where the focus is a duration adjunct, and where SINCE is a complementizer (which accounts for the preposition FOR not being found in the split construction, since it fulfils a parallel semantic function in the adjunct in [1a]).

[1c] does not meet all the criteria for a traditional it-cleft construction, but it does meet some, doesn’t it?

BillJ · Answer

Hello Stephen222

I hesitated before replying because I wanted to check up on a point you made, but more of that later.

Where the function is that of adjunct, it depends very much on the semantic category of the adjunct whether foregrounding is possible. Compare, for example, "It was because it was wet that they cancelled the trip" (reason) with the ungrammatical *"It was although it was sunny that they cancelled the trip" (concession). In the case of durational adjuncts, some seem acceptable, while others don't; compare "It was during the holidays that I worked from home" with the (probably) ungrammatical "It was all morning that she did housework".

I'm not sure why you think that "that" is part of the pattern. In my experience, it's IT + BE + PREDICATIVE COMP + RELATIVE CLAUSE. I wouldn't call the backgrounded (relative) clause a that-clause, since that would risk it being confused with content clause (also often called a that-clause). The range of words that can be used as relativizer (relative word) in an it-cleft is the same as in any 'normal' relative construction:

"It was a brand new Jaguar [that he bought]"
"It was the wording of the question [which confused me]".
"It was Ed [who complained]".
"It is you [whose head will roll]"
"It was that day [when you were drunk]"

The crucial point is that whether it be "that", or any any other relative word, the word in question is always anaphoric i.e. it has an antecedent, the distinctive feature of a relative clause. So it can hardly be the same "that" which introduces declarative content clauses, as in "They rejected the suggestion that your son was lying".

The point I wanted to check up on was whether the pattern IT's BEEN + TEMPORAL MEASURE PHRASE + SINCE + DECLARATIVE CONTENT CLAUSE is a construction that ought to be recognised within the 'information packaging' domain. I haven't managed to find anything, but I will keep it in mind and if I do, I'll post something here.

BillJ

Stephen222 · Answer

Hello Bill,

This is a most interesting discussion, and I am really glad to have discovered this forum.

You are quite right in pointing out that, in cleft constructions, the focalization of adverbials is possible only if the adjunct fulfills certain pragmatico-semantic conditions. I had never thought of that before, and it seems a very promising reflection.

I should have written that IT + BE + [X] + THAT + [Y] was the prototypical, rather than the canonical, pattern for it-cleft constructions. It is true that several WH- forms occur in cleft sentences, including WHOSE and WHICH, contrary to what some grammars say. (Although Quirk and his collaborators [2004 : 1387] consider that, whereas WHOSE is ‘allowed’ in cleft constructions, WHOM and WHICH are ‘only marginally possible’.)

The last example you provide (It was that day when you were drunk), however, does not seem to me to be a cleft sentence, although I know that some grammars adopt a broad definition of that term.
It is, in any case, very different from all the other examples you provide, in that [X] is not really ‘foregrounded’ (what I would call focalized). Proof of this is the fact that primary sentence accent falls on the focal items in the first four sentences,

It was a brand new \JAguar that he bought.
It was the \WORding of the question which confused me.
It was \ED who complained.
It is \YOU whose head will roll.,

whereas it does not in the fifth:

It was that day when you were (/)\DRUNK.

It seems to me that this sentence can be read only as a sentence containing a postmodifying restrictive relative, as opposed to a ‘backgrounded’ that-clause in a cleft-construction.

Compare
It was the man I gave the \BOOK to. (sentence containing a postmodifying restrictive relative)
with
It was the \MAN I gave the book to (not the woman). (cleft construction).

That day when you were drunk could indeed be the focus of a cleft construction, as in

It was [that day when you were DRUNK] that you promised to learn the content of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures by heart.

Note that I do not deny that that-clauses in cleft-constructions can be analyzed as a specific type of relative clauses when the focus is an argument. Indeed, most linguists seem to consider that analysis as at least partly correct.

Regarding THAT in cleft sentences where the focus is an adverbial (It was then that he realized he was lost), I am not suggesting either that it is exactly the same word as in that-clauses functioning as direct objects or noun/adjective complements, for instance (I used the generic term that-clause because you used the same terminology on the other thread about cleft sentences).

What I am saying is that it cannot strictly be analyzed as a relative word, insofar as it would be ungrammatical to replace it with a relative pronoun:

*It was that day when you were drunk when you promised to learn the content of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures by heart.

I would be very interested to learn more about the pattern IT's BEEN + TEMPORAL MEASURE PHRASE + SINCE + DECLARATIVE CONTENT CLAUSE and 'information packaging'. Do post something about it if you have more information to share on that point.

Cleft version of "Tim has not had a car for a long time"

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions