Parallelism in Grammar and Rhetoric

In his blog entry “What are the Functions of Parallelism and Chiasmus?”, which you can find further down on this page, Aaron Gowen criticizes the vague definitions of the terms “parallelism” and “chiasmus” found in some textbooks. He states that in those texts, the few examples illustrating the two concepts are taken from older literary works, whereas the common use of parallelisms and chiasmi in every-day language is completely ignored. In this blog entry, I would like to respond to Aaron’s critique by taking a closer look at the concept of “parallelism”. In my opinion, most of the misunderstandings concerning this term are created because we fail to distinguish between two different usages of parallelism, namely the grammatical and the rhetorical usage.

First of all, there is the grammatical meaning of the concept that Aaron talks about in his comment. In grammar, parallelism is the usage of grammatically similar clauses or phrases in a sentence, resulting in a parallel sentence structure. The sentence “Susan likes eating, drinking, and cooking.”, in which the verb “likes”  triggers all three gerunds “eating”, “drinking” and “cooking”, is an example for this kind of parallelism. In a faulty parallelism, by contrast, one of the words belongs to a different grammatical category, for instance: “Susan likes eating, drinking and to eat.” While this sentence is still grammatically correct, it sounds odd because “to eat” is an infinitive instead of a gerund, unlike “eating” and “drinking”.

However, there is also a second kind of parallelism, namely the one used as a rhetoric device in literary texts, which is characterized by its repetitive structure. According to literarydevices.com, “[p]arallelism is the usage of repeating words and forms to give pattern and rhythm to a passage in literature. Parallelism often either juxtaposes contrasting images or ideas so as to show their stark difference, or joins similar concepts to show their connection.” (http://www.literarydevices.com/parallelism/) Consequently, parallelism in its rhetorical usage is not restricted to grammatical concordance of several words. It rather aims at enhancing the similarity of certain images by employing parallel form. For instance, Tim O’Brien makes use of parallelism in order to compare war and peace: “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” (Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried, in: http://www.literarydevices.com/parallelism/) Similarly, chiasmi like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (John F. Kennedy) are used to highlight contrast.

Hence, the two different types of parallelism may differ in both form and function. In order to avoid confusion, it is therefore still worthwhile to differentiate between parallelism in rhetoric and grammar, although many parallelisms, such as the famous “Veni, vidi, vici”, belong to both categories at the same time.