Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing - Iain McGee
Cohesion and the Paragraph
Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing - Iain McGee
Iain McGee [+]
Majan University College
Iain McGee is an Associate Professor and Head of the Faculty of English Language Studies at Majan University College, Muscat, Oman. He completed his PhD from Cardiff University, UK, in 2006, and has published research in a number of areas within applied linguistics including collocation and the mental lexicon, lexical cohesion, data-driven learning and lexicography, teacher cognition, and paragraph analysis.
Description
The main focus of this chapter is the subject of textual cohesion, and an evaluation into whether paragraphs can be considered to be semantically cohesive units. Computational linguistic research has examined this subject in detail, using algorithms and computer systems to try to predict where, in a de-paragraphed text, the original paragraph breaks occurred. The role of lexical repetition in reflecting paragraph structure is explored together with recent attempts to incorporate paragraph-initial language into computational research.