Parenthetical Structures: Nature, Marks, Controversies

We focused in this paper on a special relation that functions at the pragmatic, discoursive level unlike all the other relations in the Romanian language: the parenthetical relation. The variety of its elements (simple or complex parts of speech, sentences or even phrases), its marks and the possibility to have a syntactic role inside their structure bring different difficulties or controversies with it. We explain some of these difficulties or errors: the difference between the disjunctive connector ori and the pragmatic connector or; the parenthetical feature of an explanatory structure or the lack of this feature; the difference between the adverbial predicate and the modality object etc.