El párrafo como unidad discursiva: consideraciones de forma y contenido relativas a su demarcación y estructuración

Abstract

In dealing with linguistics beyond the sentence, the paragraph is considered as one of the intermediate units between the sentence and the text. Rather than a purelyorthographic unit, basically delimited by indentation, the paragraph is seen as a structural unit which mainly exhibits certain formal features, but also of content, which help set up its boundaries (cf., among others, Brown & Yule 1983, Hinds 1977, Ji 2002, Longacre 1979). The study of such features, some of them depending on the specific text type, proves an interesting task in order to justify the importance of the paragraph as discourse unit. This paper intends to contribute to the study of these aspects, on the basis of a corpus of written texts from weekly news magazines in Spanish. From the point of view of the content of the paragraph but with relevance on its formal expression, a fundamental notion is that of discourse topic. Topic, and its hierarchy, is closely related to the organisation of discourse and affects other notions such as that of theme, thematic progression, topic-shift markers and the notion of episode, as a unit which can integrate various paragraphs. The paragraph is considered as a unit with internal coherence, on the one hand, and an adequate connection with the linguistic context, on the other. Depending on the communicative content of the paragraph, some studies distinguish different types of paragraph (cf. Siepmann et al. 2008) and others refer to an internal structure in the paragraph (cf. Hannay & Mackenzie 2009). In terms of the types of paragraph and their characteristics, there are interesting cross-linguistic and typological differences. Among the linguistic strategies that corpus analysis suggests in terms of paragraph transitions there are the following: a) adverbial expressions and connectors of different type and meaning, b) expressions reflecting the different patterns of thematic progression (cf. Daneš 1974, Fries 1983), c) focus constructions such as cleft and identifying constructions, d) evaluative and evidential expressions and e) the use of rhetorical questions.