Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Parenthesis

Although, parenthesis is an additional ingredient that is independent of the core structure of sentences, it is widely used in both Chinese and English languages. However, the previous researches were restricted to the descriptions of its basic overview, laws of usages, semantic features and other aspects. In the literature, there are seldom deeply analyses in comparative angle.Based on this situation, hundreds of corpus has been collected by the author to do comparative study on Chinese and English parentheses to reveal the similarities and differences in the two languages of parentheses in syntax, semantics and pragmatics levels.Firstly, this article discusses the definitions, features and characteristics of parentheses in Chinese and English languages. Secondly, it detailedly analyzes the structures, expressions and locations in the sentences of parentheses in syntactic level, then discusses the attribute classifications in semantic level and differences among the different semantic groups, and lists the communicative functions in situations such as: in turn-taking, in the middle of the conversation, at the end of the conversation and in rhetorical aspect. Finally, the author puts the results of comparison into the practice of teaching Chinese as a second language, at the same time, brings up several teaching suggestions of parenthesis in order to improve the teaching methods and teaching effectiveness.