cleft
Collocations
4ADJ.
known, most
VERB + CLEFT
flows, palsied
CLEFT + NOUN
chin, clause, heart, lip, mountains, verb, wood
PREP.
in, through, with
Definitions
noun
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.
A piece made by splitting.
a cleft of wood
A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.
verb
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).
adj
split, divided, or partially divided into two.
Thesaurus
Idioms & Phrases
Example Bank
6The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.
WiktionaryThen came some palsied oak, a cleft in him / Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim / Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
Wiktionarya cleft of wood
WiktionaryThis 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 — all
WiktionaryWhen 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).
WiktionaryThe strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]
Wiktionary