cleft
English
editPronunciation
edit- IPA(key): /klɛft/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Rhymes: -ɛft
Etymology 1
editFrom Middle English clift, from Old English ġeclyft, from Proto-West Germanic *klufti, from Proto-Germanic *kluftiz, equivalent to cleave + -t (“-th”). Compare Dutch klucht (“coarse comedy”), Swedish klyft (“cave, den”), German Kluft. See cleave.
Noun
editcleft (plural clefts)
- An opening, fissure, or V-shaped indentation made by or as if by splitting.
- 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XXVI:
- 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.
Derived terms
editRelated terms
editTranslations
editopening made or as if made by splitting
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See also
editVerb
editcleft (third-person singular simple present clefts, present participle clefting, simple past and past participle clefted)
- (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."
- 1983, John Haiman, Pamela Munro, editors, Switch-reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a Symposium on Switch Reference and Universal Grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981:
- 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.
- 2002, Claire Lefebvre, A Grammar of Fongbe, page 521:
- 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).
- 2013, Katharina Hartmann, Cleft Structures, page 270:
- The strategy the language employs is to cleft the clause containing the wh-phrase, as exemplified in (3) […]
Related terms
editEtymology 2
editVerb
editcleft
- simple past and past participle of cleave
Adjective
editcleft (not comparable)
Derived terms
editTranslations
editSplit, divided, or partially divided into two
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Romanian
editEtymology
editBorrowed from Greek κλέφτης (kléftis).
Noun
editcleft m (plural clefți)
Declension
editCategories:
- English 1-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio links
- Rhymes:English/ɛft
- Rhymes:English/ɛft/1 syllable
- English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *glewbʰ-
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms inherited from Old English
- English terms derived from Old English
- English terms inherited from Proto-West Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-West Germanic
- English terms inherited from Proto-Germanic
- English terms derived from Proto-Germanic
- English terms suffixed with -t
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English verbs
- en:Linguistics
- English non-lemma forms
- English verb forms
- English adjectives
- English uncomparable adjectives
- English irregular simple past forms
- English irregular past participles
- Romanian terms borrowed from Greek
- Romanian terms derived from Greek
- Romanian lemmas
- Romanian nouns
- Romanian countable nouns
- Romanian masculine nouns