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SPU consists
of at least two sentences, it is characterized by topical,
communicative and structural completeness and the author’s attitude towards what
is being communicated. The SPU is a complex semantico-structural unit, the
communicative value of which does not equal the sum of meanings of its
constituent
sentences, it is a new semantico-structural formation.
It should be noted that sometimes it is not easy to delimit the boundaries of
the SPU. In some cases it can coincide with the paragraph (this is especially typical
of scientific papers and business documents), while in others the paragraph can be
easily divided into several SPUs, for example, in fiction and poetry.
As for the correlation of the supra-phrasal
unity and the paragraph, a few
decades ago the SPU was considered to be a unit equivalent to the paragraph. In
today’s text linguistics there are two approaches to this problem. Some scholars
still believe that the SPU coincides with the paragraph,
or rejecting the term
“supra-phrasal unity”, consider the paragraph to be a complex syntactic unity.
Other researchers draw a strict demarcation line between the SPU and the
paragraph saying that the former is a unit of composition while the latter is a unit
of punctuation.
In the first place, the supra-phrasal unity is essentially a feature of all the
varieties
of speech, both oral and written, both literary and colloquial. As different
from this, the paragraph is a stretch of written or typed literary text delimited by a
new (indented) line at the beginning and an incomplete line at the close.
In
the second place, the paragraph is a polyfunctional unit of written speech
and as such is used not only for the written representation of a supra-phrasal unity,
but also for the introduction of utterances of a dialogue, as well as for the
introduction of separate points in various enumerations.
In
the third place, the paragraph in a monologue speech can contain more
than one supra-phrasal unity and the supra-phrasal unity can include more than one
paragraph.
