A Functional Analysis Of Parentheses In English Public Speeches

Parenthesis is a common sight in language, which appears much in all types of writings. Because parentheses are independent syntactically of the sentence it clings to, they are treated as unimportant in a sentence. With or without them, the structure and the meaning of the original sentence would not be affected. Then, why are parentheses still there in all kinds of discourses? What role do they play? In order to clarify the doubts about parentheses, the thesis sets out to study parentheses in public speeches in the theory of Halliday's Metafunction and Adjunct, aiming to give a possible answer to the mechanism of how parentheses work. At the same time, the thesis brings about a new perspective for the study of the stylistic characteristics of public speeches. 442 parentheses from 20 distinguished persuasive public speeches made by American college students are collected for the present study. By analyzing all the parentheses one by one, the author of the thesis finds that parentheses can be categorized according to their respective metafunction, which is evidence for the fact that parentheses can be analyzed by the theory of SFG. Next, on the basis of the functional classification of parentheses and the distribution of parentheses in a public speech, that is, their occurrences in a public speech and the percentage they take of all parentheses, the author of the thesis finds out that parentheses play an important part in public speeches: either in describing things, in organizing information, or interpersonally. Each contributes in its own way to the purpose of the public speech.The thesis consists of six parts. The chapter of introduction provides the motivations, the aims, the significance and the layout of the study. Chapter Two has two parts. The first part reviews the concept and classification of public speaking, as well as the stylistic characteristics of this particular means of communication. The second part is a brief introduction of parentheses including the definition, the classification and the previous researches on it. Chapter Three puts forward the theoretical framework on which the research is based. It starts by explain the reason for using Systemic Functional Grammar, and then illustrates the three metafunctions (namely, the ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function) and the theory of Adjunct proposed by Halliday. And then, an overall description of the research design is introduced about how the study is conducted and how the data are collected. Based on the theory of SFG, a classification of parentheses in a functional way is proposed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five makes a detailed analysis of English parentheses in public speeches with substantial examples and gives a detailed account of the functions parentheses can play in public speeches. The last chapter, Chapter Six concludes the whole thesis, summarizing the major findings presented in the previous chapter and indicating the theoretical and practical implications as well as limitations of this study.In all, the functional analysis of parentheses in public speeches not only helps with a better understanding of the linguistic phenomenon of parentheses but widens the application of SFG to new areas. What is more, the study of parentheses will help people to better understand the discourse characteristics a public speech.