Parentheses as a Means of Hierarchizing Journalistic Texts

Abstract

The text deals with parentheses as a means of text hierarchization, i.e., the gradation of meaning in statements and texts, which allows the author to present selected information as less important, supplementing the basic message, or, conversely, to emphasize it and draw attention to it. We base our analysis on contemporary journalistic texts for the purposes of a thesis (Paťchová, 2013), which was continuously updated between 2015 and 2020. During the research of available literature and the subsequent classification of individual excerpts, it became apparent that there is no uniform concept of the interpretation of parentheses/insertions; the available concepts are rather general, and the criteria on the basis of which individual authors define parentheses/insertions do not agree or even contradict each other. The concept of parentheses is significantly influenced by the work of J. Hrbáček (1994), who contrasts parentheses with so-called reliefing. Both phenomena are characteristic of the journalistic style, in which authors commonly and extensively use graphic symbols—dashes, parentheses, and colons—within the vertical structure of the text.