Definition of "cleft"

cleft¹

/klɛft/

noun
plural clefts
1. An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
  Quotations
  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.
  1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XXVI
2. A piece made by splitting.
3. A disease of horses; a crack on the band of the pastern.
verb
third-person singular simple present clefts, present participle clefting, simple past and past participle clefted
1. (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."
  Quotations
  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.
  1983, John Haiman, Pamela Munro, editors, Switch-reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a Symposium on Switch Reference and Universal Grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981
  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).
  2002, Claire Lefebvre, A Grammar of Fongbe, page 521
  The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]
  2013, Katharina Hartmann, Cleft Structures, page 270

cleft²

/klɛft/

verb
1. simple past and past participle of cleave
adjective
not comparable
1. split, divided, or partially divided into two.

Definition of "cleft"

cleft1

noun

Quotations

verb

Quotations

cleft2

verb

adjective

cleft¹

cleft²