A unified approach to the use of punctuation in English – Part III

As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.

But precisely when do we use each of these punctuation marks in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?

In “The parenthesis and its uses,” a six-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, I attempted to come up with a unified answer to all of these questions. I did so in the course of explaining the various grammatical and structural considerations involved in punctuating parentheticals. I posted the first part of those wide-ranging discussions in last week’s edition of the Forum; this time I am posting the second of the three-part series (October 2, 2010).

The parenthesis and its uses: parenthesis by dashes and parenthesis by parentheses

We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types—the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they aren’t expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.

This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: the parenthesis by dashes, and the parenthesis by parentheses. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly and adequately by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional—perhaps simply an aside—or contextually necessary; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.

Parenthesis by dashes. This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.

See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea.

If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” Note, though, that when parentheses are used, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he uses double dashes instead.

Parenthesis by parentheses. This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”

Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”

Even more commonly, parentheses are used to add a fact—maybe a name or a number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research (Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980) indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.”

Now that I’m done discussing the parenthesis by parentheses, I would like to take this opportunity to make a clear distinction between parentheses and brackets in American English. As I’ve earlier discussed, parentheses—sometimes called “round brackets”—are meant to convey to the reader that (1) the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to the sentence, and that (2) the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he sets them off with double dashes instead.

In contrast, brackets—also known as “square brackets”—are for more specialized uses, particularly for (1) inserting information or authorial comment into direct quotations, (2) inserting translations of quoted statements said in another language, (3) citing errors within quoted statements, and (4) setting off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses in the sentence.

Precisely when is bracket Usage #1 called for? Assume that we are quoting verbatim a passage from Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quijote in reference to Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha. Let’s say that the passage uses only pronouns to refer to Dulcinea, and we know that it isn’t permissible to alter exact quotes from a literary work. We then have to use brackets to insert information identifying Dulcinea for our readers: “‘If I were to show her [Dulcinea, his imagined Empress of La Mancha] to you,’ answered Don Quijote, ‘what merit would there be in acknowledging a truth so manifest to all? The important point is that you should believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it without setting eyes on her.’”

As for bracket Usage #2, a publication in a particular language, say English, will need brackets to insert translations of quoted statements said in another language, say Tagalog, as in the following passage from a business magazine: “‘Hindi lang kulang, kapos na kapos talaga [It’s been not only short but way, way below our needs],’ she says of the family’s finances.’”

Bracket Usage #3 is called for when we have to cite errors in quoted statements, as in this example: “Our confused physics teacher said, ‘While eating an apple in a bathtub, Isaac Newton [by traditional accounts it was actually Archimedes] shouted “Eureka!” when he discovered the basic principle of hydrostatics.’”

Finally, we may need to take recourse to bracket Usage #4 to set off a parenthetical that’s already set off by parentheses, as in this example: “The life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (who wrote three major philosophical studies [On the Orator, On the Republic, and On the Laws] at a time that he still couldn’t engage in politics) coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.” Such usage isn’t a pretty sight, but there are times when scholarly exactitude demands it.

***

This ends the three-part series on the parenthesis and its uses.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 9 and February 16, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

A unified approach to the proper use of punctuation in English

As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, semicolon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.

Punctuation marks, of course, usually serve the basic purpose of providing desired pauses and stops within a sentence, as in this sentence from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” Here, we have the commas providing short pauses, the semicolons, longer pauses; and the period, a full stop. Then here’s a sentence that uses a colon to formally and emphatically introduce something: “This is what he always watched for in his business: the bottom line.” And finally, from a short-story by a friend of mine, Palanca Awards Hall of Famer Ed Maranan, here’s a sentence that uses a pair of dashes to set off a parenthetical remark from the main sentence: “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.” (Click this link to read my discussions with Ed about the punctuation of this sentence.)

This brings us to the big question regarding these punctuation marks: Precisely when do we use each of them in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?

In “The parenthesis and its uses,” a six-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, I attempted to come up with a unified answer to all of these questions. I did so in the course of explaining the various grammatical and structural considerations involved in punctuating parentheticals. I would like to share the wide-ranging discussions in those six essays with Forum members, so I have reconstituted them into three parts for consecutive posting in the Forum.

Here now is the first of those three parts (September 18, 2010):

The parenthesis and its uses - I

We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as the parenthesis ( ), but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks, of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.

Let’s take a look at the following forms of the parenthesis along with examples of each:

(1) Parenthesis by comma: (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

(2) Parenthesis by dashes: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”

(3) Parenthesis by parentheses: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”

In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a parenthetical, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.

So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?

In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a nonrestrictive relative clause. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, it is nondefining information. The sentence will thus remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.

For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence:

“Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

“Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.

We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.

Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?

The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a proper noun is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, a proper noun is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: it generally won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.

Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas, as in this erroneous construction: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Indeed, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases.

It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was not the same Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas—along with the mandatory conversion of the predicate of the sentence into a negative form—indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique but one of a number who made the claim; he could not have been the same Ferdinand Magellan referred to in the sentence with the restrictive relative clause.

Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave earlier as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthe­tical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the appositive phrase. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.

The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences. We will continue this discussion in next week’s edition of the Forum.

Next Week: The nonrestrictive appositive phrase

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 12 and 18, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Parenthesis isn’t just optional material or an afterthought - Parts III and IV

We normally use the pair of curved marks known as the parenthesis to indicate textual material that’s optional to our sentence or that’s simply an afterthought. But the parenthesis is actually much more than just a punctuation for such added material. Indeed, the parenthesis in general is not the punctuation mark being used per se but the word, phrase, or even a full sentence that it encloses within the sentence. And the punctuation mark for parenthetical material isn’t necessarily the pair of curved marks that we are very familiar with; it could be a pair of enclosing commas or dashes—even brackets—depending on the degree of punctuation required by the parenthetical statement.

What follows are Parts III and IV of the four-part essay I wrote for my column in The Manila Times in January-February of 2008:

The parenthesis and its uses

Part III

We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I presented for evaluation in the preceding essay: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added state­ment that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.

That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.

The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sen­tence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the state­ment in the second sentence an appo­sitive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interest­ing to read: “Cleo­patra, the le­gendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly in­fluenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.

The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of the non­restrictive type, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like non­restrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.

But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. We will take them up in the next essay. (January 26, 2008)

The parenthesis and its uses

Part IV

We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types, the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they are not expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.

This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: the parenthesis by dashes, and the parenthesis by parentheses. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional or contextually necessary, perhaps simply an aside; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.

Parenthesis by dashes. This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical “they said they didn’t know it then” from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.

See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea; structurally, they also truncate the sentence.

If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” When parentheses are used, however, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he or she would when using double dashes instead.

Parenthesis by parentheses. This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”

Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”

Even more commonly, parentheses are used to add a fact—maybe a name or number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research (Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980) indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.” (February 9, 2008)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 26 and February 9, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.