Parentheses

3 Key excerpts on "Parentheses"

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  Parentheticals in Spoken English

  The Syntax-Prosody Relation

  • Nicole Dehé(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Taglicht (1998: 195) defines a parenthet- ical provisionally as a non-initial and non-final “syntactic node for which the grammar specifies no function in relation to any sister node”. De Vries (2012a: 153), maintaining that “it is far from obvious how to define paren- thesis either syntactically or phonologically, even though everyone recog- nizes it intuitively”, offers the following working definition: “parenthesis is a grammatical construction type that involves a message that is presented or perceived as secondary with respect to the host, where message covers propositions, modal propositions, questions, metalinguistic comments, and so on”, leaving open what is included in “and so on”. From a semantic point of view, Potts (2005) argues that parentheticals are perfect illustrations of conventional implicatures (CIs) as formulated by Grice (1975). According to Potts (2005, 2007), their content is speaker oriented and discourse-new, but de-emphasized in the given context; it is outside the regular content of 1 Parentheticals in English: introduction 2 Parentheticals in English: introduction the utterance; it is not contextually determined, but part of the conventional meaning of the words. Following Potts (2005), Kluck (2011: 229) includes speaker orientation in her (working) definition of parentheticals and states that parentheticals are expressions which are “structurally and semantic- ally independent of [their] host” and express “speaker-oriented content”. Moreover, it has been observed and often been taken for granted that par- entheticals are “marked off from their hosts by some form of punctuation in writing or special intonation contour in speech” (Burton-Roberts 2006: 180). Dashes, commas or Parentheses do the job in writing, while these devices correspond to tonal and temporal prosodic cues in spoken language.

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  Why We Punctuate; or, Reason Versus Rule in the Use of Marks

  • William Livingston Klein(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  “Sic” is put in italics because this is the conventional way of writing most words from a foreign language. The words “are to,” being a suggested part of the text, are put in the text letter. Words thus supplied by the translators of the Bible are put in italics, simply to show their character, as is explained in the preface or elsewhere. Brackets are not used in the Bible text.

  Sometimes a line of poetry is too long for the type-measure in which the poem is set. If one or more words of such line are carried forward to make a new and very short line, the space between the full line above and the full line below such short line may be as wide as the space between two verses, and thus present a bad effect to the eye. To avoid this the extra word or words may be put in the line above, if the space permits, and at its end, with a single bracket at the left to cut it off from the preceding words in the same line.

  It is a common practice in legal and commercial work to enclose in Parentheses Arabic figures corresponding to the preceding number expressed in words. This practice often gives rise to a mistake that, when pointed out, is plain enough to anyone:

  117. Pay to John Smith or order twenty-five ($25.00) dollars.

  The matter in the Parentheses should be simply “25,” to correspond with what precedes; or the sentence should be written thus:

  117-1. Pay to John Smith or order twenty-five dollars ($25.00).

  When a woman signs her name to a letter, especially a letter to a stranger, and wishes to give other information than the name conveys, or to indicate how she should be addressed in a reply to her letter, Parentheses are used for the purpose:

  118. Mary Louise Brown.

  118. (Mrs. George H. Brown. )

  If she wishes simply to convey information as to whether she is a married or an unmarried woman, she uses the proper title, enclosed in Parentheses, before her name:

  119. (Miss) Mary Louise Brown .

  119-1. (Mrs.) Mary Louise Brown

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  Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces

  • Andreas Trotzke, Josef Bayer, Andreas Trotzke, Josef Bayer(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Marlies Kluck

  6 On representing anchored Parentheses in syntax

  6.1 Introduction

  Parentheses constitute a quirky class of constructions that are somehow interpolated in a regular sentence (the host or matrix clause). This ‘motley crew’ (Dehé and Kavalova 2007) ranges from unrelated utterances that are freely interjected in a sentence, to appositives, which clearly express information about a particular matrix constituent. We can more generally distinguish between ‘free’ (1) and ‘anchored’ (2) parenthesis:

  • (1) Free parenthesis
    1. Newton’s Principia – take a seat – was finally published in 1687.
       [interjection ]
    2. Einstein’s theory of special relativity – I think – was presented in his 1905 paper.
       [comment clause ]
    3. The professor made out with – and we all knew that – lots of students at the party.
       [and -parenthetical ]
  • (2) Anchored parenthesis
    1. Bea kissed Bob, who she has known since high school, at the party.
       [nominal appositive relative clause/NARC ]
    2. Bea kissed Bob, her high school sweetheart, at the party.
       [nominal apposition/NA ]
    3. Bea kissed someone, I think it was Bob, at the party
       [sluiced parenthetical ]
    4. Bea kissed [I think it was Bob] at the party.
       [amalgam ]

  Intuitively, there is a clear parallel between these interpolations: they all add some non-restrictive, secondary content to what is expressed by their hosts. However, the Parentheses in (1) are not related to anything specific in their hosts, whereas the ones in (2) all add information about a particular (understood) constituent in the host. That is, the Parentheses in both (2a), (2b) and (2c) provide extra, more specific information about Bob and someone . The construction in (2d) is an example of so-called sentence amalgamation (Lakoff 1974), and closely resembles the parenthetical in (2c). In this case however, the interpolation consists of a reduced it -cleft, of which the cleft pivot is associated with an null matrix argument, namely the understood object of kissed

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