There are 3 sentences that I'd like to know more deeply. The sentence structure that I'm trying to talk about is "is..that.." sentence pattern like "It is essential that we start preserving parks". Then, how about "it..when","it..the first time.."? Can I use either like followings?
It must have been when I was 4 that I first met him
It must have been when I was 4 the first time I met him.
It must have been when I was 4 when I first met him
Best Answer
"It...that" isn't really a pattern - your examples are about different uses of English that happen to have an "it" and a "that" in them.
"It" is often used for what's called *impersonal constructions", i.e. expressions where there is no subject, but English demands that a subject be used.
For example, in English you can't just say "Is raining." You have to say "It is raining." What or who is "it" in that sentence? Nobody - we need to insert it because verbs require a pronoun to make a sentence.
So let's look at your first example in more detail:
The first part is "it is essential". Again, we have an "it" because we can't start the sentence with just "Is essential" - the verb ("is") requires a pronoun ("it"). The second part is "we start preserving parks". The subject isn't the same in both parts - in the first one it's "it", in the second one it's "we". The role of "that" is to connect these two parts with different subjects. Note that we could rephrase this as
This sentence has just one part, because there is just one subject - "it". We have no use for "that". In general, the patten we observe here looks like "It is X that Y", where X is something like: essential, important, necessary, fortunate, unfortunate, surprising, etc, and Y is a sub-sentence with its own subject, different from "it". Some examples:
Note that there are cases where we use something different from "that" to connect to sub-sentences, for example:
Now let's look at your other example:
The pattern you're actually seeing here is "It is/was when X that Y", as in the following examples:
You can rephrase these sentences in various ways:
This generalizes to the broader pattern "it is/was .... that ....":
That's also why the other two options you provided don't really work:
You're missing the "that" from the pattern, and in order to put in in the sentence, you have to also change it a bit:
Your last example is:
Again, you are missing the "that", and you've replaced it with "when", but that sounds very odd. You can rearrange the sentence so you can use "when I first met him":