Forms and Functions of Meta-Discourse

1 Introduction

Speakers occasionally shift out of the level of linguistic production during conversations to comment on what they are saying. To perform these shifts, they employ expressions that can be categorised as parentheticals, parenthetical inserts, fragments, theticals, or comment clauses. Most of these labels emphasise the syntactic parenthetical nature of such strategies (Brinton 2008; Haselow 2020: 15). Let us consider the following examples from English:

(1)	And that is just the kind of order, it seems to me, which ought to have been granted if the plaintiffs’ contentions are correct.
(BNC, academic prose: politics law education)

(2)	I propose to encapsulate their effect in a number of propositions which can,