Abstract: English parallelism, as a syntactic structure, has textual functions as well as rhetorical effects. As a device of pragmatic reordering of information, parallelism performs, in constructing a text, such textual functions as topic-introducing, topic-developing, topic-concluding, textual cohesion and coherence, focus-highlighting and focus-contrasting. These textual functions of parallelism usually work together to make a text into a semantic whole.