Is the parenthetical necessary in this sentence from a government web portal: “For all its contradictions—maybe even because of them—the region has something for everyone”?
To answer this tough question raised by Forum member Miss Mae sometime ago, let’s first get a clear idea of what a parenthetical is.
IMAGE CREDIT: ENGLISH.STACKEXCHANGE.COMKINDS OF PARENTHETICALS IN ENGLISH
By definition, a
parenthetical is any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence by some form of punctuation. Its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. It’s not necessarily optional or semantically expendable though, for it may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, establish the logic of the sentence, or convey a particular tone or mood. Indeed, the necessity for a parenthetical largely depends on the kind of punctuation the writer chooses for it.
Parenthetical by commas. The most basic parenthetical is set off from the sentence by a pair of commas, like this one: “Jose Rizal
, who was the seventh of 11 children, was born in 1861 to a prosperous
haciendero couple in the Philippines.” Here, the parenthetical is the nonrestrictive relative clause “who was the seventh of 11 children.” Recall that a nonrestrictive clause provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in short, it is nondefining information. Thus, the sentence will remain grammatically and semantically intact even without it: “Jose Rizal was born in 1861 to a prosperous haciendero couple in the Philippines.”
PARENTHETICALS SET OFF BY COMMAS
Parenthetical by dashes. The second type of parenthetical is set off from the sentence by a pair of dashes, as in the sentence Miss Mae presented: “For all its contradictions
—maybe even because of them—the region has something for everyone.” Here, the pair of dashes folds into the main sentence this subordinate idea, “maybe even because of them.” The pair or dashes provides a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than that provided by a pair of enclosing commas.
PARENTHETICALS SET OFF BY A PAIR OF DASHES
A parenthetical by dashes won’t work when punctuated by a pair of commas instead of a pair of dashes: “For all its contradictions, maybe even because of them, the region has something for everyone.” By using commas, we come up with a
run-on sentence—the
comma splice type—because the pauses the pair of commas provide are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea.
Parenthetical by parenthesis. The third kind of parenthetical is set off from the sentence by the familiar curved marks we know as the parenthesis.
PARENTHETICALS SET OFF BY A PARENTHESIS
An interesting question, though, is if the punctuation provided by the parenthesis will work in Miss Mae’s sentence.
Let’s see: “For all its contradictions
(maybe even because of them), the region has something for everyone.” Well, the sentence obviously remains grammatically airtight, but the use of parenthesis instead of dashes clearly implies that the writer or speaker doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he would when he uses double dashes instead.
Now we are ready to answer Miss Mae’s question at the outset: Is the parenthetical necessary in the sentence in question?
It actually depends on the writer’s intention or style. By using the pair of dashes as punctuation, the writer had evidently wanted to dramatize the alternative or contrasting idea expressed by the phrase “maybe even because of them.” But note that the writer could as well have chosen to be just matter-of-fact about that alternative by using the conjunction “or” to indicate it: “For all its contradictions
or maybe even because of them, the region has something for everyone.”
This time we find it’s not absolutely necessary to use the phrase “maybe even because of them” in parenthetical form.
(Next:
When to use full infinitives, bare infinitives, or gerunds - 1) June 20, 2019
This essay, 1,148th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the June 13, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
