Saturday, November 3, 2012
anacoluthon \an-uh-kuh-LOO-thon\, noun
1. A construction involving a break in grammatical sequence, as It makes me so—I just get angry.
2. An instance of anacoluthia.
She employed, not from any refinement of style, but in order to correct her imprudences, abrupt breaches of syntax not unlike that figure which the grammarians call anacoluthon or some such name.
-- Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past
Sometimes there is no main verb at all, or the sentence is an anacoluthon, beginning in one way and ending in
another.
-- Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
Anacoluthon has a very literal meaning in Greek. The root kolouth- meant "march." However this root has two prefixes. First, the prefix a- means "together." The other prefix "an-" means "not following." In Greek anakólouthos meant "not following."
