An anacoluthon (; from the Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: anakolouthon, from Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: an- 'not', and Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: akólouthos 'following') is an unexpected discontinuity in the expression of ideas within a sentence, leading to a form of words in which there is logical incoherence of thought. Anacolutha are often sentences interrupted midway, where there is a change in the syntactical structure of the sentence and of intended meaning following the interruption.[1]
An example is the Italian proverb "The good stuff – think about it."[2] This proverb urges people to make the best choice. When anacoluthon occurs unintentionally, it is considered to be an error in sentence structure and may result in incoherent nonsense. However, it can be used intentionally as a rhetorical technique to challenge the reader to think more deeply, or in stream-of-consciousness literature to represent the disjointed nature of associative thought.
Anacolutha are very common in informal speech, where a speaker might start to say one thing, then break off and abruptly and incoherently continue, expressing a completely different line of thought. When such speech is reported in writing, an em dash (—)[3] or ellipsis is often included at the point of discontinuity. The listener is expected to ignore the first part of the sentence, although in some cases it might contribute to the overall meaning in an impressionistic sense.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton uses an anacoluthon with Satan's first words to illustrate his initial confusion:
Additionally, Conrad Aiken's Rimbaud and Verlaine has an extended anacoluthon as it discusses anacoluthon:[4]
The word anacoluthon is a transliteration of the Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἀνακόλουθον (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: anakólouthon), which derives from the privative prefix Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἀν- Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: an- 'not', and the root adjective Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἀκόλουθος Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: akólouthos 'following'. This, incidentally, is precisely the meaning of the Latin phrase Latin: [[Non sequitur (logic)|non sequitur]] in logic. However, in classical rhetoric, anacoluthon was used for the logical error of Latin: non sequitur and for the syntactic effect or error of changing an expected following or completion to a new or improper one.
The term anacoluthon is used primarily within an academic context. It is most likely to appear in a study of rhetoric or poetry. For example, the 3rd edition of The King's English, a style guide written by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, mentions it as a major grammatical mistake:[5]
The word, though not the underlying meaning, has been somewhat popularized due to its use as an expletive by Captain Haddock in the English translations of The Adventures of Tintin series of children's books.
The poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis defines anacoluthon as "the grammatical switching of horses in midstream of a sentence: beginning a sentence in one grammar and ending it in another". She argues that it involves "the employing of multiple discursive ranges and disjunctive transpositions from one to the other[,] hence in any one poem, far from being in one mode, one register, one stable voice, a writer is like an acrobat ... a Barthesean weaver of a wacky fabric, or someone who 'samples', like a certain kind of contemporary DJ".[6]