On some peculiarities of parenthesis functioning in contemporary popular science texts (based on the English version of National Geographic)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of contemporary English media texts from the point of view of functional syntactic peculiarities of its expressiveness, especially on the example of parenthesis as a means to influence the recipients. The domineering cognitive-discursive paradigm of text studies allows one to analyze media text from the point of its integral impact on the addressee. Contemporary mass media use different ways of influencing the readers, for example, television, radio, printed and electronic press, blogs and videoblogs. A special interest lies in the printed press, which uses integrated means of transmitting information, including references to Internet sources and TV shows. Despite using different ways of influencing the recipients, the key means of conveying author’s intentions is its syntactic organization. Due to different syntactic constructions authors of a media text can facilitate a topic disclosure, forming the readers’ opinion about a subject matter and the author of the text. A great role is played by parenthesis, which is widely used in popular science texts to explain terms, comment on certain events or sources of the information given in the article, clarify some information, etc. In the given article we analyze some functions of the parenthetic constructions on the example of the texts taken from the magazine National Geographic and unified by the topic «Science» in accordance with the author’s communicative intentions. Using continuing sampling method in choosing the examples conveying the category of expressivity, it was discovered that the domineering function of a parenthetical phrase in the analyzed texts is a comment, which serves as a means of representing an author’s point of view and adding information to the facts thus forming the readers’ opinion.