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The article is devoted to a complex syntactic whole as a linguistic and methodological unit. The article discusses the inseparability of expression and content planes, as well as structural and semantic indicators of linguistics. The article reviews the literature on the complex syntactic whole. Also, special attention is paid to the main features of complex syntactic units, and to the final sentences of a complex syntactic whole which help to connect separate sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary school teachers expect students to write comprehensible paragraphs in their texts. However, an explicit way of teaching to write a paragraph doesn't exist. This article describes a text analytic study of compliance with language norms in paragraphs in two genres: e-mails with a request and persuasive texts. It addresses the question to what extent the paragraphs of thirteen- and seventeen-year-old students comply with the paragraph norms constructed on the basis of Dutch professional advisory books. Our findings indicate that students in Dutch secondary school have difficulty writing adequate paragraphs. Our results additionally suggest that students' paragraph skills increase over time and vary across genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late linguist M.A.K. Halliday described the last paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species, with its description of a tangled bank, as one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the whole of literature. Yet it appears marred by an obvious grammatical mistake. In this article, we seek to show that the apparent mistake is actually the vestige of a now extinct form of paragraph in which the structure we now reserve for a single sentence could be extended over a whole paragraph or even many paragraphs. We first zoom out to show that the final sentence makes sense in the context of the paragraph as a whole, and then zoom out again to show that the modern paragraph itself is still a work in progress. Finally, we use a comparison between English and Farsi to try to show that all such grammatical choices mediate between humans and their environment. This relationship too is a work in progress in which the grammar of a language has an important role to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary school students have to learn how to write comprehensible paragraphs as part of a text. But to this very day it is not clear to these students and their teachers what exactly the standards, the language norms, are for a comprehensible paragraph. The study summarised here presents a reconstruction of language norms for a paragraph in Dutch and legitimises these on the basis of theoretical and empirical research outcomes in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. An analysis of 29 Dutch professional advisory books shows that paragraphs are seen as important textual elements. Although advisory books differ considerably with respect to the level of detail in which paragraph norms are discussed, they converge on the nature of those norms. Textbooks used in the teaching of Dutch as a first language, however, witness a striking diversity with respect to the paragraph norms they mention. The current study contributes to the development of a theoretically grounded and practical approach that helps teachers train their students in writing adequate paragraphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal language has been traditionally criticized as being verbose and obscure (Alcaraz Varó, 2007, p. 73; Alcaraz Berenguel, 2009; Alcaraz Varó y Hughes, 2009, p. 18; González Salgado, 2009, pp. 2-3). One of its main features is the use of complicated and inappropriate syntax, creating excessively long sentences and paragraphs; as a result, comprehension becomes difficult (Ministerio de Justicia, 2011, p. 13). For this reason, many countries have set out the need to simplify legal language in order to bring Administration and Justice closer to citizens (Toledo Báez, 2008; González Salgado, 2009, p. 3; Montolío Durán, 2012; Relinque Barranca, 2017). This work studies if simple language suggestions made by the language policies of US and Spanish countries and by the campaigns that defend the use of plain language in the legal field are applied in US and Spanish judgments of the Intellectual Property field. Thus, it presents a macrotextual analysis to study the use of paragraphs in two independent corpora made up of thirty US original judgements (176,821 words) and thirty Spanish original judgments (111,818 words). This analysis follows the grounds set up by the field research Lenguaje escrito, carried out by the Comisión para la Modernización del Lenguaje Jurídico (Ministerio de Justicia, 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article deals with the question of paragraphs in classical Latin texts. In the first half, it presents and illustrates two major problems that can arise from an editor's careless division of a text into paragraphs (i.e. change in reference of anaphoric pronouns; misleading text segmentation). In the second half, the article claims and tries to prove (largely on the basis of the inner characteristics of texts) that ancient authors (or at least auctor ad Herennium, Cicero, Sallust, and Suetonius) structured their texts into paragraphs, though they used various other means than indentation to signal it to the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concision, clarity and precision, the basic criteria in scientific communication, are unfortunately increasingly ignored in different level scientific papers. Recurrence proliferation, among other errors that hinder readers' comprehension, perhaps also hampers further implementation of potentially fruitful research results. This paper aims at highlighting the need for style revision and editing scientific reports by experts or a keen eye responsible for respecting the reader's time, to avoid flaws that may be remedied on time, for the sake of the scientific community itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Writing classes and style manuals consistently emphasize proper source acknowledgment in published writing (hence also in student work). Though attribution is commonly held to be of paramount importance on ethical and other grounds, published writers regularly manage to dispense with explicitness about the use of source material in the course of a text. That is, attribution is often merely implicit – sometimes so weakly so that a scrutinizing reader may be unsure whether it even exists. How is such discourse possible, given the usual strictures? Reports on two data collections based on reader judgments, in which readers are shown to use textual organization (heading, paragraph structure) cues in inferring the presence or absence of attribution, help suggest answers to this question. The stated need to attribute is argued to be highly conditional, based more on a principle of assessed risk than on a categorical requirement of the type normally taught in expository writing classes. This risk-based principle may help account for the minimal use of attribution in certain genres of writing (e.g., basic-level textbooks, newspapers and high-circulation magazines) and its maximal use in others (e.g., scholarly journals). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper reports on a study that concerns the discourse functions of paragraph divisions in narrative texts. By conducting two segmentation tasks the study obtains both episode and paragraph divisions of the unparagraphed versions of 10 English narrative texts. The episode divisions, which represent the points of thematic discontinuities in the narrative texts, are compared with the paragraph divisions, which, as conventionally used, organize the narrative texts into intermediate structural units. The comparison of the two groups of divisions indicates that the great majority of the paragraph divisions serve to mark the thematic discontinuities of various kinds as reflected in the episode divisions. More specifically, the paragraph divisions are found to be used consistently in marking the thematic discontinuities associated with the prototypical episodes. They are used less consistently yet frequently in marking the thematic discontinuities associated with the subepisodes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

During distributed virtual laboratory experiment sessions, a major problem is to be able to collect, store, manage and share heterogeneous data (intermediate results, analysis, annotations, etc) manipulated simultaneously by geographically distributed teammates composing a virtual team. The electronic notebook is a possible response to this concern. In this paper, we present an electronic notebooks repository using LIP and LOM metadata standards. This repository is implemented as a learning object database. According to the curricula, the notebooks are classified by teaching fields and subjects. Simulation results show the effectiveness of such representation, particularly in terms of response times required to carry out transactions when operating the repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]