I just started reading a short story by Kate Chopin: "The Story of an Hour", and got stuck on the phrase "in broken sentences". What does it mean?
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her.
Best Answer
Here are the first two paragraphs of the story in which the quoted sentences appear:
The idea conveyed by "broken sentences" is of speech in which the message is expressed in halting or faltering words, so that the effect is as though the speaker were making several attempts to express the message but abandoning the line of thought partway through each time, or or as though the speaker were unable to complete the message through an excess of emotion.
So, in the story in question, instead of saying something like this:
Josephine must have said something like this:
These are broken sentences because, even though one can find complete sentences (such as "I hardly know where to begin" and "We must be strong") in the course of the quotation, the speaker is not assembling her words, sentences, and fragments into a coherent narrative.