A Functional Approach To Study English Parentheses

The aim of this thesis is to study English parentheses from a functional perspective. Drawing on SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar), the aim is centrally achieved by constructing a functional definition and classification for parentheses and then explore how they function in English. The data for the study includes 180 texts taken from 21st Century and The New York Times published from January to July in 2007.Parentheses, such as fortunately, in one word, I think and so on, are found to exist in a large amount in both written and spoken English, which have already aroused attention of many scholars both at home and abroad. But as for the literature about English parentheses that is available, these studies have the following problems: (1) There are still a lot of argument and confusion about the delimitation of parentheses, for example, some scholars limit parentheses only to the adverbs or while other scholars classified appositives into parentheses as well, and so on; (2) The studies on parentheses are mostly restricted to the grammar analysis and some specific pragmatic functions, which are far from enough for describing and explaining this language phenomenon systematically. Thus, the present study with English parentheses as the research focus takes these problems as points of departure. Based on the parts of metafunctions and Adjuncts in SFG, this thesis attempts to make a more comprehensive study on English parentheses.This thesis is mainly composed of the following five chapters:Chapter 1 briefly introduces what, why and how to do the present research, that is, it briefly introduces the research question, rationales and methodology of the present study.Chapter 2 presents a literature review of the previous studies on English parentheses. It is written in an attempt to show that they are mostly restricted to the grammar analysis and some specific pragmatic functions, so this thesis will make a research from another perspective– SFG, in order to make clear the problems such as definition and classification which exist in the previous studies.Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical foundation of the present study– SFG, especially the parts of metafunctions and Adjuncts, which helps a lot in the process of defining and classifying parentheses based on their functions.Chapter 4 explores and discusses English parentheses in the actual texts taken from 21st Century and The New York Times, which is based on the functional classification proposed in the Chapter 3. Some findings are derived from the detailed sample analysis and statistical analysis as follows: (1) It is found that, with the modal and conjunctive functions in the discourse, parentheses are more often used as the means of relating the message to the preceding part; (2) For the Modal Parentheses, showing opinions is found to be the most often used function which can make the utterance sound more subjective or objective to the listener(s); while for the Conjunctive Parentheses, showing the enhancing relation to the preceding part is found to be the most often used function; (3) It is found that, because of the communicative purposes in the discourse, parentheses are most likely to be inserted in the initial position of the sentence, to be more precise, the Modal ones favor the medial position while the Conjunctive ones favor the initial position. Still, a lot of examples from the sampled texts are interspersed as illustrations and explanations to these findings. At the end of this chapter, some implications to the discourse analysis are offered as well.Chapter 5 concludes by summarizing the major findings of the research, by discussing the linguistic and practical contributions of the study, and by suggesting limitations and further directions for research. The contributions of the study are made as follows: (1) Linguistically, a functional definition and a functional classification are proposed which provide the foundation for the further study on English parentheses; (2) Practically, based on the findings of the present study, some implications to the discourse analysis are offered. The further research directions are suggested as follows: (1) An attempt to explore English parentheses from the perspectives of all the three metafunctions may be a potentially rich area for investigations; (2) A large corpus-based work represents the challenge for the future work.