cleft

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

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

   • 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.
2. 2

   A piece made by splitting.

   • a cleft of wood
3. 3

   A disease of horses

   A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.

4. ›+ 3 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      To syntactically separate a prominent constituent from the rest of the clause that…

      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."

      • 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) […]
   2. 5

      simple past and past participle of cleave

   3. 6

      split, divided, or partially divided into two.

The neighborhood

• neighborcleavage
• neighborcleave
• neighborcleaver
• neighborcloven
• neighbordimple