cleft

plural clefts

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

   The river flows through a cleft in the mountains.

   2 more examples

   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

   First of all they released the arms from the bodies, then making four clefts at the end of each arm they fashioned hands and fingers.

   1918, James George Frazer, Folk-Lore In The Old Testament, volume 1, page 42

2. A piece made by splitting.

   a cleft of wood

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

present singular third person clefts · participle present clefting · participle past clefted · past clefted

1. human sciencesTo 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."

   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

   2 more examples

   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

1. participlepastsimple past and past participle of cleave

1. not comparablesplit, divided, or partially divided into two.

   Synonyms: cloven