Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Part I. Italian Cleft Constructions in a Contrastive Perspective -- Cleft constructions in a contrastive perspective -- Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news -- Cleft sentences. Italian-English in contrast -- Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-French in contrast -- Pseudo-cleft sentences. Italian-Spanish in contrast -- Cleft sentences. Italian-Danish in contrast -- Cleft sentences. A translation perspective on Italian and French -- Part II. Romance and Germanic Cleft Constructions in Contrast -- Frequency, form and function of Cleft constructions in the Swiss SMS corpus -- Inferential cleft constructions in translation -- Motivating w(h)-Clefts in English and German: A hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study -- Subject index