[Grammar] Do they belong to it-clefts?

[smallhenry]

The clip: https://youtu.be/upvvvICISZ8?t=221

Angie's boyfriend, Lou, would come and go in the apartment since Angie had given him a key. One day, he was in and heard someone in her room. He decided to check and found only the doll on the floor. He turned to leave and suddenly felt a sharp pain on his chest. When he looked under his shirt, he found bloody claw marks, as if he had been attacked by a wild animal. But there was no one else in the room and making things even stranger, he reported that the claw marks vanished without a trace in only two days.

Was Lou attacked by a demonic force? Did he hallucinate the whole thing? Or was it a supernatural force making him think he was attacked?

If we answer "Yes, it was a supernatural force making him think he was attacked" or "No, it was not a supernatural force making him think he was attacked" to the last question, is either of the answers considered an it-cleft sentence?

I mean, according to the grammar pattern of it-clefts, they should be either "Yes, it was a supernatural force that made him think he was attacked" or "No, it was not a supernatural force that made him think he was attacked". I'm curious if reducing the relative clause in an it-cleft sentence makes the sentence a completely different usage, or just makes it an informal usage of it-clefts.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

If I understand right, you're wondering if "making" and the made in "that made" are both considered the second verb of an it-cleft sentence.

It makes sense to me, but i'm not a grammarian. Let's see what one of the English teachers here says.

 

[PaulMatthews]

If we answer "Yes, it was a supernatural force making him think he was attacked" or "No, it was not a supernatural force making him think he was attacked" to the last question, is either of the answers considered an it-cleft sentence?

I mean, according to the grammar pattern of it-clefts, they should be either "Yes, it was a supernatural force that made him think he was attacked" or "No, it was not a supernatural force that made him think he was attacked". I'm curious if reducing the relative clause in an it-cleft sentence makes the sentence a completely different usage, or just makes it an informal usage of it-clefts.

No: I wouldn't say so.

An it-cleft has the backgrounded component expressed in a relative clause. But making him think he was attacked is not a relative clause of any kind, but a non-finite gerund-participial clause. Importantly, unlike a relative clause, it doesn't have an element (like a relative pronoun) that is anaphorically linked to the head noun "force".

Further, in an it-cleft construction, the relative clause does not modify the head noun, i.e. they do not combine to form a constituent, a noun phrase. But in your example, the subordinate clause is modifying "force" to form a larger noun phrase.

The gerund-participle clause is semantically similar to a relative clause: compare a supernatural force that was making him think he was attacked, but syntactically it is not a relative clause or some hybrid form of one.