Parallelism And Its Quantitative Analysis In Discourse

Ideas are mainly embodied in languages. Great idea such as the one given by Abraham Lincoln "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is quite familiar to English learners. Since not every great idea is well remembered as this one, there must be something that helps to imprint the idea on people's mind. It is no doubt that, the parallelism or parallel structure that has made this statement particularly impressive and easy to remember. Parallelism finds wide applications in different discourses, such as in prose, political speeches and many other sub-literary uses of language, such as proverbs, folk songs, slogans, etc. It is also used in writing practice and testing. The author makes comprehensive study and quantitative analysis of parallelism to see how native English speakers use it in actual language communication. The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter I is the introduction. The concept of parallelism is put forward in this chapter. Chapter II defines parallelism in narrow sense and in broad sense. In narrow sense, parallelism is an important figure of speech. In broad sense, it is a grammatical structure and also a cohesive device. The chapter also presents nature of parallelism and concept of double parallelism and triadic parallelism. These two forms are used widely in English.Chapter III deals with the rhetorical features of parallelism. This chapter first explains its rhetorical functions, such as brevity, emphasis, contrast and coherence. Then it tells that parallelism often blends other figures of speeches such as repetition, antithesis, syllepsis, zeugma, climax, etc.Chapter IV states the linguistic features of parallelism. It is necessary to balance linguistic elements with each other. Almost any kind of sentence elements can be placed in a parallel construction. These features are discussed in phonological parallelism, lexical parallelism, phrasal parallelism, syntactical parallelism, and discourse parallelism.Chapter V is the focus of this thesis. It presents a quantitative analysis of parallelism in different discourses. Special attentions are paid to prose and political speeches. By the collection and processing of the statistical data, the author finds that native English speakers tend to use parallelism in formal political speeches; tend to use double parallelism much more than triadic parallelism and other forms of parallelism and tend to use small-sized parallelism much more than large-sized parallelism. Chapter VI is the conclusion. In the conclusion, parallelism is the deviation use of language as Wang Zuoliang, the distinguished Chinese scholar, points out. It is greatly discussed as a rhetorical device as well as a grammatical structure and a cohesive device. The author hopes the thorough description and the quantitative analysis of it will help English learners to master the use of it and contribute to English learning and research.