A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Parenthetical Discourse Markers-Pride And Prejudice As An Example

English parentheses are one kind of common linguistic phenomena whichfrequently appear in both written and spoken English. As a type of independentstructures, parentheses act as cohesive means connecting two points of a discourseand influence utterance production and interpretation. They facilitate humancommunication to some extent. Many scholars have explored the definitions andclassifications of parentheses from different perspectives. And some special pragmaticfunctions of parentheses have been discussed. From a comprehensive view to thestudy of parentheses, there are three different approaches: the functional-grammaticalapproach, semantic approach, and cognitive-pragmatic approach. This thesis willadopt relevance theory to explore the application of parentheses in humancommunication.Relevance theory, proposed by Wilson and Sperber, is the base ofcognitive-pragmatic approach. It regards communication as a kind of cognitiveactivities, and explains the information processing in utterance interpretation throughcognitive theories. Human communication has only one model, namelyostensive-inferential communication. From the speaker’s angle, communication is anostensive behavior. When the speaker utters a set of information, he also conveys thecommunicative intention to the hearer. On the part of the hearer, communication is aninferential behavior. He should get the speaker’s communicative intention by a certaininferential process. Each act of the speaker should be optimally relevant, since humanmind tends to connect utterance with optimally relevant information. Therefore, theinformation conveyed by the speaker should be made relevant to the hearer and henceit deserves his processing effort. Parentheses function as guiders in the hearer’sinferential process. They attract the hearer’s attention and direct the hearer’sinferential computation towards relevant contextual assumptions. Through theanalysis of examples from the novel Pride and Prejudice, parenthesis is to beexplored as an effective means of indicating the intended inferential route, andconstructing interlocutors’ cognitive contexts in communication. Specifically, parentheses construct cognitive context by lexical, logical, and encyclopedicinformation. With the application of parentheses, the hearer can strengthen an existingassumption by contradicting and eliminating other assumptions and the speaker candeliver contextual implication and achieve optimal relevance. In addition, there is onefurther point to make. Parentheses express procedural meaning, so they can performas semantic constraints on relevance. They can restrict any aspect of inferential phaseof utterance interpretation, either explicit or implicit.This paper not only centers on the role of parentheses in utterance interpretationwithin relevance-oriented framework, but also discusses the main functions ofparentheses from three aspects, namely pragmatic, interactive and rhetorical aspects.Through the employment of parentheses, the interlocutors can avoid uncertainty andimpoliteness. Besides, parentheses can impose constraints on the interlocutors’contextual assumptions and cognitive results. At the same time, they increase therhetorical flavor of expressions in communication. The present study provides ageneral principle for communicators in practical application. Only when people canhave a better understanding of the nature and functions of parentheses, can theymanipulate this linguistic expression in real communicative context.