• What is a solecism?
• Examples of solecism

We explain what a solecism in language is, how this type of error can occur in speech or writing and various examples.

Solecisms are frequent mistakes in everyday speech but serious in writing.

What is a solecism?

Solecism or also anacoluto is called what the grammar normative or prescriptive understood as an error of syntax, that is, to a sudden change in the formulation of a sentence, altering the usual or "correct" order of its terms and, therefore, producing an inconsistency in it.

In other words, these are undue alterations to the order of the elements of a prayer, which are extremely frequent in the speaks everyday, the result of improvisation, but much more serious in the written language. Sometimes they can be used expressly, as a form of Figure of speech or poetic turn, and in this case it is known as reluctance.

This may involve sudden changes in the subject of the sentence, the lack of concordance between verb and subject, the improper use of prepositions or connectors, and other forms of syntactic error that, in a formal language, convey clumsiness and untidiness.

The word solecism comes from ancient Greek soloikismós, with the exact same meaning, formed from soloikós ("Barbarian", "who does not speak well"); for its part, anacoluto also comes from the Greek anakoluthos, translatable as "inconsistent" or "inconsistent", since it derives from koluthos, "Path", in the sense that "it does not follow the same path."

Examples of solecism

Here are some examples of common solecisms:

• "I haven't seen them for years" (verb concordance error).
• "The keywords of the article are the following" (concordance error of the adjective).
• "In the past there were many cases like that" (pluralization error if there were).
• "She sat away from me in the living room" (it should be "away from me").
• "People complained all the time" (error of pluralization of the verb).
• "There have been dozens of attacks against the government" (error of pluralization of the verb).
• "Do you remember what I told you yesterday?" (omission of the "of").
• "I brought her a gift to Maria" (loísmo, substitution of "la" for "le").
• "One of those who ran the marathon suffered a heart attack" (error in singularization of the verb).
• "My group does not like those jobs" (change of the subject of the sentence).
• "My father, his bosses promoted him" (change of the subject of the sentence).
• "The Japanese invented a device that who uses it can fly" (relative pronoun without clear syntactic function).