As Much As / Cleft Sentence

Question

I have difficulty understanding the following sentence from President Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.

For as much as government can do, and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.

I am facing two comprehension problems on this sentence:

(1) What does the "as much as" section mean and grammatically function?

According to my English usage book, "as" and "though (mostly British usage)" can be used in a special structure after a noun, both denoting "although"--therefore this section could be virtually the same with "much as government can do..." And it says that "as...as" is common in American English.

As such, I have assumed this section means "although government can do and must do much." Is this understanding right?

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(2) Is the main clause "it is...upon which..." considered as a cleft sentence?

According to the usage book, the structure "it is (the words to be emphasized) that..." is used to make a cleft sentence.

Excluding the emphasis placed, the main clause seems to mean "this nation ultimately relies upon the faith and determination of the American people." So, I guess this is a cleft sentence, although I am quite unsure whether "it is...upon which..." can ever be used in producing a cleft sentence.

For a non-native speaker, it is very challenging to fully comprehend such a sophisticated and complicated sentence.

Thank you for your invaluable knowledge.

Answer 1

Your understanding and paraphrase of (1) is totally correct.

Your understanding of (2) is also correct. It is a cleft sentence. You may be confused because of the combination of the preposition upon with the relative pronoun which.* However, there is nothing special about this construct. From the point of view of the cleft sentence structure, it's just another relativiser which introduces the subordinate clause, as per Wikipedia's schema of a cleft sentence:

• it + conjugated form of to be + X + subordinate clause

(With the small augmentation that is has an adverbial modifier ultimately in your sentence.)

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*Although the phrasal verb rely upon may be learned as a single lexeme, it still makes sense to analyse it as rely + indirect object, syntactically speaking.

Answer 2

For as much as government can do, and must do ..., it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.

"For as much as the government can do ..." functions as a concessive adjunct whose subject is "as much as government". The meaning, roughly, is "Despite the extent of what government can do ...".

Yes, leaving the adjunct aside, it's a cleft construction. The basic equivalent would be:

"This nation relies ultimately upon the faith and determination of the American people".

In the cleft construction, the relative clause (functioning as complement of "be") is the somewhat formal "upon which this nation relies", where "which" has "the faith and determination of the American people" as antecedent.

Within the relative clause, the PP "upon which" functions as complement of "relies".

We understand that this nation relies upon the faith and determination of the American people.

Answer 3

Isn’t everyone over-engineering this?

“For as much as government can do, and must do” means simply “Whatever government does…”; nothing more.

Doesn’t that make “… it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies” much more clear?

How about “… what matters is the faith and determination of the people”?