Recursion in the paragraph as a unit of discourse development

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Abstract
This paper investigates recursion in the paragraph, discussing it in the context of grammatical hierarchy and illustrating it by the use of natural texts. The paragraph is considered to be a structural unit, which has semantic unity of theme along with certain morphosyntactic features of closure and internal cohesion, that is, the use of conjunctions, time and location phrases, anaphora, and tense‐aspect markers. In discourse, paragraphs function as the basic units of discourse development. In narrative discourse in particular, a paragraph typically functions as an episode, and the episodes are the developmental units of narratives. Recursive structure, such as an embedded result paragraph within a sequence paragraph, is frequently found, as shown in the analyses of two short narrative texts (one English and the other Korean). These texts are analyzed at the paragraph and discourse levels, and are presented here in both tree diagrams and function‐set (slot‐class) representations.

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