Home › Glossary › Letter S

Syntactic break

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An intentional disruption of expected grammatical order within a poetic line, often used for emphasis or rhythmic effect.

Detailed Definition
A syntactic break is a deliberate fracture in grammatical continuity—through fragmentation, interruption, or omission—that disrupts expected sentence flow to convey psychological distress, urgency, or conceptual rupture; common in modernist and confessional poetry, it mirrors the disjointed nature of thought or trauma, as in Plath’s abrupt clauses that mimic fractured consciousness or wartime poetry’s shattered syntax reflecting battlefield chaos.
Example
Example in poetry:
A syntactic break fractures sentence structure for effect: “I ran— / no, crawled— / toward the light.”; “She said: nothing.”; “And the world— / what was left of it— / turned away.”; Fragmented lines in war poetry: “Gunfire. Mud. A name.”
Additional Notes
Syntactic break|An abrupt interruption or shift in the grammatical structure or sentence flow, often marked by heavy punctuation (dash, colon) or a major enjambment, drawing attention to the point of rupture.
Also Known As
Syntactic rupture Grammatical break Sentence fracture Anacoluthon
Skip to main content