cleftとは 意味・読み方・使い方

発音

• IPA: /klɛft/
• 韻: -ɛft

語源 1

From 中期英語 clift, from 古期英語 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.

名詞

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.

   • 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.

2. A piece made by splitting.

   a cleft of wood

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

派生語

関連する語

参考

• dimple

動詞

cleft (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."
   • 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) […]

関連する語

• clefting
• cleft sentence

語源 2

動詞

cleft

1. simple past and past participle of cleave

形容詞

cleft (not comparable)

1. split, divided, or partially divided into two.

   Synonym: cloven

派生語

• in a cleft stick