Cleft constructions are non-canonical in several regards: they deviate from a minimally complete grammatical structure since they involve lexical material absent from the corresponding non-cleft; they are information packaging devices and are rare across registers. Previous work on clefts has identified various factors influencing the use of clefts, such as formality, topicality, weight, and informativity. Building on these findings, this chapter examines the communicative purpose of evaluating as a further factor by comparing a large corpus of primarily evaluative texts with a control corpus of primarily non-evaluative texts. This investigation reveals that in both corpora most clefts are evaluative. They are thus very closely associated with the situational communicative intention to evaluate (rather than with the primary textual communicative purpose). Consequently, clefts are a (more) canonical syntactic choice when speakers/writers intend to express evaluations and may even be regarded as part of an extended set of overtly evaluative lexico-grammatical stance constructions. The study further shows that the formal and semantic characteristics of clefts, including the presupposition, the ‘known fact’ effect, and the exclusiveness implicature, permit the flexible foregrounding and backgrounding of evaluations, which, in turn, may account for the frequent evaluative use of these constructions.