Cleft

/klɛft/ · noun

Meaning

An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting..

Definitions by Sense

1. An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
2. A piece made by splitting.
3. A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.
4. (linguistics) To syntactically separate a prominent constituent from the rest of the clause that concerns it, such as threat in "The threat which I saw but which he didn't see, was his downfall."
5. simple past and past participle of cleave
6. split, divided, or partially divided into two.

Example Sentences

The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him / Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim / Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

a cleft of wood

This may be so because in most languages the most natural clefting involves NP's, and it is in fact hard in most languages to cleft the verb, although some — notably Kwa languages in West-Africa — allow such clefting.

When the affected object is clefted, the clefted constituent may be assigned a contrastive reading on the event denoted by the clause, as is shown in (62).

The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]

Synonyms for cleft

Antonyms for cleft

Related Words

Word Forms

• clefts
• clefting
• clefted

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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