Definition:Parenthesis/Natural Language

Definition
In natural language, parenthesis is used to indicate certain explications and explanations are not essential for the flow of the text or argument.

Statements which have undergone the operation of parenthesis are said to be in parenthesis.

The symbols often used to indicate parenthesis are the round brackets "(" and ")", the dash "$-$" and commas ",".

Example
In:


 * Quantifiers (the symbols $\forall$ and $\exists$) are used to express statements about all objects in the universe at once.

the phrase:


 * the symbols $\forall$ and $\exists$

is said to be in parenthesis.

In this example, parenthesis is used to explicate what quantifiers are.

Also known as
The symbols "(" and ")" are (like almost any symbol conveying a certain operation) also often called parentheses.

Thus, it is often the case that statements in parenthesis are also in (between) parentheses.

Therefore, as a kind of pars pro toto, many people say statements are in parentheses instead of the formally correct in parenthesis.

Linguistic Note
The plural of parenthesis is parentheses.

Parenthesis is correctly pronounced pa-ren-ti-sis, and parentheses is pronounced pa-ren-ti-sees.