Cleft ἔστιν

ObjectivesLearning objectives

• The syntax and semantics of cleft ἔστιν

VocabularyVocabulary

GrammarGrammar Topic: Cleft ἔστιν

A cleft sentence is a sentence like There is a gnome in Mary’s garden or It is evening. A normal subject and predicate are not found in these sentences. We can rearrange the sentence to make it a normal copula sentence (e.g. A gnome is in Mary’s garden or The time is evening), but these are, of course, different sentences. Cleft sentences are unique in that they appear to have a dummy subject such as ‘there’ or ‘it.’ In the case of Greek, the subject is absent, as we will see. The form of cleft ἔστιν differs from the normal copula in that it is accented on the first syllable in the present, but besides this, it can only be distinguished from the copula in its syntax and meaning.

SyntaxSyntax: Cleft ἔστιν

The basic facts about cleft ἔστιν are that it is only found in 3rd person, and it can be found in the Eluon, Luo, and Luso forms. Besides differing from the copula ἐστίν in its accenting, it also has unique syntactic features. Whereas the copula ἐστίν combines a subject and a predicate and usually occurs after the subject, cleft ἔστιν normally occurs first in the sentence and does not have an easily identifiable subject and predicate. There is debate within linguistics about the subject of cleft sentences, but this debate is not important to us here: what is important is that cleft sentences only have one explicit constituent. In It is evening, the initial it is acting like a dummy subject, and the only explicit constituent is evening. The fact that we say It is evening in English and not Is midnight is a fact about English, and it is a way in which Greek differs from English. Cleft ἔστιν does not occur with a pronoun in Greek, e.g. It is evening is not αὐτὸ ἔστιν ἑσπέρα, but it is only cleft ἔστιν + ἑσπέρα:

• (500) In 3^rd person with one constituent ἦν ἑσπέρα ἤδη (Acts 4:3)
• It was already evening

One complicating factor in identifying cleft ἔστιν is that Greek allows for an implied subject, and the form ἔστιν is found when it comes at the beginning of its clause and after the negator οὐκ. Thus, the form ἔστιν should not always be interpreted as a cleft:

In John 13:10, there is an implied subject, λελουμένος, and ἔστιν is accented initially because it is first in its clause. In Matt 28:6, there is an implicit subject pronoun referring to Jesus (mentioned in the previous verse), and the form ἔστιν is found because the copula subject is preceded by the negator. In contrast to these examples, our example in Acts 4:3 has no obvious implicit subject in the context, so the only constituent is ἑσπέρα.

SemanticsSemantics: Cleft ἔστιν

Cleft ἔστιν has a variety of functions and interpretations. First, it can be used to assert the existence of something:

A certain kind of sin, namely one that leads to death, is contrasted with another kind of sin in existence in the following verse, which says καὶ ἔστιν ἁμαρτία οὐ πρὸς θάνατον ‘And there is sin that does not lead to death.’ Both kinds of sin exist.

Second, cleft ἔστιν can be used in a focus construction. Syntax C covers focus constructions in much greater detail, but they essentially involve the negation of alternatives: