Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Not conforming to accepted patterns of syntax.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Loosely put together; irregular; ungrammatical.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I might suggest that the work of Goldsmith demonstrates the degree to which the most conventional conversation already offers us, readymade, a radical grammar, as asyntactic and as asemantic as any literature by the avant-garde itself — and as a result, Goldsmith has said that he can no longer listen to dialogue in films, plays, or poems, because it sounds completely artificial in the wake of such analysis.

    Poetic Machines 04 : Christian Bök : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007

  • Nor does it much detract from the grace of the work that of the "asyntactic disorder" of which Mr. Pattison accuses Milton's prose, some examples may be found in his own.

    Lectures and Essays Goldwin Smith 1866

  • Since the avant-garde relies upon subversive strategies of asyntactic, if not asemantic, expression, such writing often seems to resemble the nonsense produced by either the unskilled or the illiterate, camouflaging itself in the lousy style of the ingénue in order to showcase the creative potential of a technique that less liberal critics might otherwise dismiss as a fatal error — a flaw that, at the outset, discounts the work from any further reading because it has already forfeited the values of both official grammar and sensible meaning.

    Writing and Failure (Part 3) : Christian Bök : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007

  • - asyntactic; irregular; pertaining to ataxy. adj. - of or pertaining to freedom from anxiety or emotional disturbance; calm and imperturbable

    xml's Blinklist.com 2008

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