Parenthetical Element

3 Key excerpts on "Parenthetical Element"

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  Parentheticals in Spoken English

  The Syntax-Prosody Relation

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

    (Publisher)

  1 A monograph on parentheticals should reasonably begin with a definition of the phenomenon under investigation. Several definitions of parentheticals have already been offered in the literature, all of which have in common that a parenthetical is considered a linguistic entity which is linearly inte- grated in another linguistic structure but is unrelated to the surrounding linguistic material in one way or another, i.e. in terms of syntactic struc- ture, semantic meaning and/or intonation. For example, Burton-Roberts (2006: 179) maintains that a parenthetical (P) is “an expression of which it can be argued that, while in some sense ‘hosted’ by another expression (H), P makes no contribution to the structure of H”, i.e. it is structurally unrelated. Bussmann (1996: 349) makes a similar point in defining a paren- thetical as an “[e]xpression (word, phrase, clause) inserted into a sentence from which it is structurally independent: Her new boy-friend – his name is Jacob – will be coming over tonight.” She thus touches on the diversity in structural complexity: parentheticals can be anything from a single word to a full clause. Biber et al. (1999: 1067) add the aspect of meaning, defining a parenthetical as “an interpolated structure … a digressive structure (often a clause) which is inserted in the middle of another structure, and which is unintegrated in the sense that it could be omitted without affecting the rest of that structure or its meaning”. 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”.

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  The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia

  • Louise Cummings(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  P

  Parentheticals

  Parentheticals are expressions of varying length, complexity, function and syntactic category, which are interpolated into the current string of the utterance. Expressions that have been argued to be parenthetical in nature include sentence adverbials and adverbial clauses, one-word expressions (e.g. English like, say, what ), comment clauses (e.g. English I think, I suppose, you know , German glaube ich , French je pense ), reporting verbs (e.g. English he said, said she ), vocatives, nominal appositions, non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRC), question tags, and various types of full or elliptical clauses (cf. Dehé and Kavalova 2007 and Kaltenböck 2007 for overviews).

  In syntax , a contradiction exists between far-reaching structural independence of the parenthetical from its host utterance on the one hand and linear order and certain existing hierarchical relations on the other hand. Accordingly, parentheticals have either been argued to be external to the syntactic structure of their host sentence (e.g. Haegeman 1988; Peterson 1999; Espinal 1991; Burton-Roberts 1999b), or loosely related to it, for example, in terms of adjunction (Ross 1973; Emonds 1973, 1976, 1979; McCawley 1982; Corver and Thiersch 2002; Potts 2002; D’Avis 2005; Vries 2005, 2007) or insertion (Ackema and Neeleman 2004). Those approaches that assume structural independence account for linearization and apparent surfacing relationships along the lines of semantic association (e.g. Peterson 1999), utterance interpretation (e.g. Haegeman 1988), or serialization in the phonetic component (e.g. Haider 2005).

  In prosodic research, parentheticals have been argued to be in their own intonational domain and marked by a change in pitch level, loudness and tempo. Prosodic cues indicating phrase-level boundaries before and after the parenthetical include pauses (e.g. Altmann 1981; Astruc 2005; Bolinger 1989; Payà 2003a; Taglicht 1998), falling-rising pitch at the end of the immediately preceding domain (e.g. Local 1992) and the blocking of sandhi rules (e.g. Frota 2000). We also know that the intonational features of parentheticals depend on various factors, among them length, relative weight and syntactic makeup and position (e.g. Bolinger 1989). Certain types of relatively short parentheticals, such as comment clauses, reporting verbs, question tags and vocatives, may be prosodically integrated into an adjacent domain (e.g. Crystal 1969; Taglicht 1998; Wichmann 2001; Gussenhoven 2004; Peters 2006; Dehé 2007). While shorter parentheticals are more likely to be prosodically integrated than longer ones (e.g. Peters 2006), empirical research has shown that the placement of an intonational boundary before NRRCs or other types of sentential parentheticals is far from obligatory, and that it depends on position, prosodic make-up and discourse factors (Watson and Gibson 2004; Dehé, to appear).

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  Dialogue Analysis 2000

  Selected Papers from the 10th IADA Anniversary Conference, Bologna 2000

  • Marina Bondi, Sorin Stati, Marina Bondi, Sorin Stati(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In doing that, their discourse shifts from the role as speakers to the role as observers and commentators. Parentheticals represent sentential and intersentential strategies of planning, signalling, explicitating, justifying and/or evaluating the ongoing talk. 254 Cornelia Ilie 2. Formal identification of parentheticals in parliamentary transcripts The corpus that has been investigated for this study consists of transcripts of debates in the House of Commons randomly selected from the Hansard records, the actual title of which is Parliamentary Debates - Official Report. For the purpose of the present investigation, the range of the searched items was restricted to one specific category of parentheticals, namely mid-sentence parentheticals (= parentheticals that occur in the middle of a speaker's sentence). Thus both sentence-initial and sentence-final parentheticals have been excluded from the corpus search. The reason for focusing on this particular category, i.e. mid-sentence parentheticals, is twofold: on the one hand, they can be more easily isolated from the constituents of the sentence in which they occur and analysed separately; on the other, their rhetorical functions can be more appropriately tested and compared contextu-ally, as well as intertextually. According to the graphic conventions used in the Hansard records, mid-sentence paren-theticals are singled out in the Hansard records in two ways. The most common ways of marking mid-sentence parentheticals is to insert them between dashes, or between commas. A further, but rather infrequent category of mid-sentence parentheticals are formally unmarked in the sense that they are not inserted, but directly embedded in another sentence. Only a few such mid-sentence parentheticals have been found in the examined corpus. In spite of their name, parentheticals are not conventionally marked by brackets in my corpus of Hansard transcripts.

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