ABSTRACT
Word order is part of the syntax of a language, and can be at the core of syntax. English is fairly fixed in its word order, meaning that the grammatical role of an element will often depend on where it occurs in the sentence. Cleft sentences are used to highlight a piece of information from a sentence. They get their name from 'cleaving' (that is, splitting) a clause into two parts, each one getting its own verb. The main clause normally has 'it' as the subject and 'be' as the verb in English, and in Catalan the verb 'esser' is used. A pleonasm is where an element of a phrase is repeated, either unnecessarily or for emphasis. In terms of word order, this frequently occurs when the word order is changed to be able to put emphasis on an element at the start or end of the sentence, a phenomenon known as left detachment and right detachment.
