anacoluthon (n.)

A traditional rhetorical term, sometimes encountered in LINGUISTIC studies of conversational speech. It refers to a SYNTACTIC break in the expected GRAMMATICAL sequence within a SENTENCE, as when a sentence begins with one CONSTRUCTION and remains unfinished, e.g. The man came and – are you listening? ‘Anacolutha’ have come to be especially noticed in linguistic studies as an area of PERFORMANCE features which a grammar of a language would aim to exclude.