Paragraph functions

The main purpose of the paragraph - the dismemberment of the text in order to highlight its components, which, of course, facilitates the perception of the message, as it gives some "breathing space" when reading, and also places accents. Text that is not divided into paragraphs is perceived with difficulty; the force of its impact on the reader falls. Difficulty reading leads to loss of interest and dull attention. Let's compare, for example, two versions of the same text, differently designed, divided and not divided into paragraphs.

1. In the Pushkin Mountains - winter. Timid, never brave enough, without snowdrifts and white caps on trees, without icy steam and frost. Only in the morning the frost slightly tickles the nostrils, and then under the still dim February sun all the light is lit up in a slightly pinkish tone - and the whitewashed houses, and a thin canopy of snow on the roofs, and the walls of the Svyatogorsky monastery, where 136 winters ago, with fierce February, squeaky sledges brought the body Pushkin. In oblivion? In immortality. Mikhailovskaya groves without snowdrifts are peep through. Savkina, a hill with a chapel, where Pushkin dreamed of arranging his office, bristles on the slopes with islands of brown grasses. It can be seen from here far around, perhaps, further than in summer. But everything seems closer - and Trigorskoye, and the most extreme edge of the forest, closing the horizon. Only off the coast, the ice managed to narrow down the already narrow Swash, but its dark streams near the wooden walkways right under the poet's house are transparent to the bottom. And right at home in the blissful silence, drops of fun are cheering up - as if it were quite springtime when the sun rises higher. And when the brief evening mixes up its calm daily shadows, everything dark gradually dissolves into the night, and the whiteness of the fields is like the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper or canvas, waiting for the artist's brush.

2. In the Pushkin Mountains - winter. Timid, never brave enough, without snowdrifts and white caps on trees, without icy steam and frost. Only in the morning the frost slightly tickles the nostrils, and then under the still dim February sun all the light is lit up in a slightly pinkish tone - and the whitewashed houses, and a thin canopy of snow on the roofs, and the walls of the Svyatogorsky monastery, where 136 winters ago, with fierce February, squeaky sledges brought the body Pushkin.

In oblivion?

In immortality.

Mikhailovskaya groves without snowdrifts are peep through. Savkina, a hill with a chapel, where Pushkin dreamed of arranging his office, bristles on the slopes with islands of brown grasses. It can be seen from here far around, perhaps, further than in summer. But everything seems closer - and Trigorskoye, and the most extreme edge of the forest, closing the horizon. Only off the coast, the ice managed to narrow down the already narrow Swash, but its dark streams near the wooden walkways right under the poet's house are transparent to the bottom. And right at home in the blissful silence, drops of fun are cheering up - as if it were quite springtime when the sun rises higher.

And when the brief evening mixes its quiet shadows with the daytime, everything dark gradually dissolves into the night, and the whiteness of the fields is like the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper or canvas waiting for an artist’s brush (Week. 1973. February 18-25).

It is needless to explain that the second option is more convenient for perception: the actualization of significant parts of the text contributes to the strengthening of its influential role of the reader.

However, the writer often sets himself other tasks: it is important for him to draw a picture that is complete in impression, when the meaning of the description consists precisely in the absence of tension, when it is necessary to show not the eventual significance of the description, but only the hero's involvement in the environment, the general mood caused by the painted picture. In this case, a slow rhythm is needed, which is often achieved by the absence of paragraph division: the thematic transitions are obscured, the rhythm is softened, the details are blurred, and the general impression of the description comes to the fore. Take the following passage:

The night was August, starry, but dark. Because before I had never been in such an exceptional situation, which I accidentally got into now, this starry night seemed to me deaf, inhospitable and darker than it was in reality. // I was on the railway line, which was just was built. High, half-ready mounds, heaps of sand, clay and rubble, barracks, pits, scattered cars here and there, flat elevations above the dugouts in which the workers lived - all this rotary, painted in dark colors in one color, gave the earth some strange , wild physiognomy, reminiscent of the times of chaos. In everything that lay before me, there was so little order that it was somehow strange to see silhouettes of people and slender telegraph poles among ugly dugout, unlike anything else; those and others spoiled the ensemble of the picture and seemed not of this world. / / It was quiet, and only heard over our heads, somewhere very high, the telegraph buzzed its boring song (A. Chekhov).

This passage is easily divisible into three parts (see conventional symbols). But the author does not do this, because for him it’s not the event side of what is happening, but the emotional one. The effect of a fragment that is not divided into paragraphs is to create a mood — the sad mood of a person left alone with nature, which seems grandiose to him, and he himself is ... small and obscure.

As we see, the artistic text has its own laws of construction, its own logic of division.

The paragraph division, as was said, pursues one common goal - to identify significant parts of the text. However, parts of the text can stand out for various reasons, with different specific targets. And therefore the functions of the paragraph are different.

For example, a paragraph can be a purely formal means of distinguishing the replicas of different people in a dialogically constructed text:

The engineer opened the door, let Paschka in. Not hiding surprise, stared at him.

Pashka nodded to the table piled high with papers.

- Do you compose sad poems?

- I do not understand, listen ...

“You will understand, ” Pashka sat down at the table, pushed the paper away with his elbow. - Do you like Nastya?

- Listen! .. - The engineer began to blush.

- Love. So this: go get her here — she is sitting in the car (V. Shukshin).

In a monologue text, paragraphs perform more complex functions, the basis for the division of the text into paragraphs becomes selective, and selectivity may be objective, related to the character of the text itself, and subjective, reflecting the author's intention.

The main functions of paragraph division are as follows: logical-semantic, expressive-emotional, accent-excretory. Naturally, functions can be combined in whole or in part, especially with regard to the second and third functions.

The logical-semantic function of a paragraph can be found in the texts of different target settings - in scientific, educational, artistic.

For example, the following passage is clearly subject to the logical-semantic principle, although at the same time the accent-excretory principle also acts as an additional one, since parts of a single complex syntactic whole are emphasized with the help of a paragraph:

How to get information from an object that is where a person cannot yet be, for example, on other planets of the solar system, or is this object located for a long time, for example, in space, in the deep sea, in areas representing hard-to-reach areas of the earth's surface?

How to use the information obtained in the process of complex automated production, which characterizes the phenomena of short-term, but which can have serious consequences for the production?

How can we get and quickly use the information coming from a large number of correspondents, for example, when taking measurements that aim at obtaining all sorts of information about the object of interest to us?

Such tasks are set for the weather service, which needs to receive information round-the-clock from numerous automatic meteorological stations (AI Voronkov, EV Mukhin. Measuring information systems).

The logical-semantic principle is more complicatedly prepared in the artistic text, where the subjective author's corrections are made to the objective process of division of the text. For example, the following story by I. Bunin is divided into four paragraphs, although, in particular, the second one unites several micro-themes:

Twilight stood in the forest, and the forest stretched for many miles around us, silent and darkening, and it seemed that the whole forest land was immersed in a sad and calm silence of a slowly approaching night.

Tired of a long evening walk, we silently walked along deaf paths under the canopies of birch trees and fir trees, and the unsteady half-light, which was preserved from sunset, was thawing before our eyes. The shallow marshy lake, along the edges of which we passed, was still white between the trees, but it was dim and as sad as everyone in the forest, waiting for the nighttime bad weather. Clouds were coming, quietly merging with darkness; the warm, sleepy air was filled with the spicy aroma of marsh grasses and pine needles, the fireflies smoldered in golden emeralds under bushes, hopping under the mysterious whisper of grasshoppers ... To shorten the way, we turned from the lake into a long and wide corridor of ancient pines and, hardly distinguishing in half-light the road, went through the deep sand and tree roots to the meadow. Soothed by the long evening silence, happiness, which had long been broken by nothing, we were silent and seemed to be unnecessary for each other.

And suddenly, with a sharp rustling in a dry, confused conifer, a large, big-headed bird jumped out of the forest and, like a ghost of something gloomy, soared before us on wide wings, silently described it over the clearing and drowned in more often. Without even crying, you darted away from her, and, instinctively holding your hand, I felt how quickly my heart fluttered. And a shy smile flashed in your eyes through tears, and they shone with such beauty that I had never seen in them even in moments of happiness!

The dark, high forest and the deaf glade over which the bird dashed off, just as if by magic, changed for me at that moment. The forest immediately became hostile and stern, a feeling of sorrow pricked in the heart; the silence of the oncoming night, which was stormy in itself, seemed ominous to me, but how my vision sharpened, how my strength quickened, and how tightly I squeezed your hand as I walked through the woods to the house! And I felt that your heart also beats joyfully with its proximity to me and that we still have reliable protection from the sinister ghosts of the night! (Night-bird).

This text clearly and consistently with the help of paragraphs outlines the change in the different states of the participants of the described event: 1) a measured, calm and rhythmically smooth description of the state of the environment and several tired, but calm and happy characters; 2) a dramatic change in rhythm, a change in the monotonous description of the agitated; 3) growing anxiety and, at the same time, exacerbation of a sense of inner concentration for the sake of opposing a hostile, disturbing world.

Even more difficult was the division of the text in the miniature of M. Prishvin, where there are inclusions of dialogical speech in the text of monologue:

At the edge of the road, among lilac bells, a mint bush bloomed. I wanted to pick a flower and smell it, but a small butterfly, folding its wings, sat on the flowers. I did not want to upset the butterfly because of my pleasure, and I decided to wait a bit and began to write, while standing by the flower, one thought in a little book.

It so happened that I forgot about the butterfly and wrote for a long time, and when I finished, I came to my senses - it turned out that the butterfly was all sitting on the mint flower in the same position.

But this does not happen! - and a little bit with the tip of my foot I pushed a stalk of mint. The butterfly swung heavily, but still did not fly away. Did she die on a flower?

Carefully, I took the butterfly by the folded wings. The butterfly did not tear, did not beat in the fingers, did not move the antennae. She was dead.

And when I began to draw her from a flower, along with her, a light yellow spider with a greenish ball, hidden in a flower, pulled away. He embraced the butterfly's belly with all his legs and sucked it.

And summer residents passed by and said: “What nature, what day, what air, what harmony!”

Is it not clear that nature is in no way harmonious, but a feeling of harmony, joy, happiness is born in the soul of a person (Dead Butterfly).

And in this text accent allocation emphasizes the logical-semantic sequence in the description.

However, the logical-semantic principle in its pure form or enhanced by accent-excretory in an artistic text can be violated in order to give the text emotional qualities. Then the principle of expressive-emotional division of the text comes into force. In such cases, the paragraph breaks the logical-semantic thread of the description or narration and fully serves the purpose of influencing the reader's emotions. Such a paragraph is not dictated by the structure of the text itself, it is highly authorial, often even violates semantic articulation, shifts the rhythm, interrupts the even flow of the narration. For example:

He [Chekhov] rushed to Russia, he suffered and burned from annoyance, from bitterness, because he did not see, but only divined all her untold and undiscovered beauty.

The regret for life, which was very short and, in his opinion, almost barren and only slightly touching him with its fast wing, tormented him in this house with its long-established comfort of the end of the XIX century.

And not only him. For some reason, every person who has fallen into this house, began to think about his fate, especially if he overlooked his life and only now realized it.

Why this happened is hard to say. Obviously, the harmony of Chekhov's life and his genuine optimism made people check their lives (K. Paustovsky. Golden Rose).

More examples of expressive articulation of the text, breaking the logical and semantic links of a single complex whole:

It was necessary to stop, enter the hut, see the gloom of embarrassed eyes — and again go further in the noise of the pines, in the trembling of autumn aspens, in the rustling of coarse sand pouring into the rut.

And look at the flocks of birds that pull in the heavenly mist over woodland to the dark sub. And it is sweet to be depressed from the feeling of your kinship, your closeness to this dense edge (K. Paustovsky. Copper horseshoes).

... His head was spinning from telescopic, and for some reason, absurdly, he felt her, his head ...

During. So it seemed to him that he easily, like some kind of attachment, took his head off his shoulders and now (it immediately fell to the size of an apple, very neat) turned it in his hands, with surprise, but also somehow looking indifferently as if it were not his own. .. (A. Bitov. Photo by Pushkin).

This technique is particularly effective in highlighting individual paragraphs of repeated syntactic constructions. Their effect on the attention and feelings of the reader is obvious, and the rhythm created by this division also contributes to this.

Here are some examples:

There is such spiritual confidence when a person can do everything.

He can almost instantly write such poems that the descendants will repeat them for several centuries.

He can hold in his mind all the thoughts and dreams, to distribute them to the first person he met, and not for a minute regret it.

He can see and hear magic things where no one notices them: a silver stump on a moonlit night, the sound of air, a sky that looks like an old sea map. He can come up with many amazing stories.

Approximately the same condition now experienced Lermontov. He was calm and happy. But not only Shcherbatova love. Reason said that love could wither away. He was happy with his thoughts, their strength, breadth, his intentions, the all-pervading presence of poetry (K. Paustovsky. River Spills).

The autumn sun was quickly leaning towards the horizon, but I didn’t want to leave. It was possible to sit for days on the beach and look into the fog, trying to discern the features of unknown shores, and then understand that these are not the shores, but a ridge of clouds hanging in the sky very far, perhaps over the Sea of ​​Marmara.

It was possible to pour sand and find fragments of shells, scales of mackerel, fragrant threads of sea grass, fragments of marble and chalcedony.

It was possible to look at the eyes of a fierce crab and, raising the rotting grass, to see fireworks from transparent sea fleas.

It was possible to consider underwater worlds, listen to the breath of a woman keen on reading, and reflect on the near times when leisurely contemplation would be recognized as necessary for a person as sleep and reading (K. Paustovsky. Black Sea).

Thus, the division into paragraphs in different types of text has a common basis - logical and semantic, however, there are specific differences in the use of the paragraph. This specificity is created by a different nature of the impact on the reader: for texts aimed only at intellectual perception, paragraphs based on the thematic principle are indicative (a new paragraph reveals a new topic), for texts designed not only for intellectual but also emotional perception - paragraphs accent, expressive-excretory. At the same time, one should not forget about the purely subjective moment - the author's manner of organizing the text by means of paragraph division. Известно, что объем текста между абзацными отступами у разных авторов различен, и объясняется это многими причинами: жанровыми особенностями произведения, его функционально-стилевой принадлежностью[1], стилистической тональностью, общим объемом произведения, его назначением, авторской манерой изложения и т.д. For example, L.N. Толстой в своих романах часто объединяет ряд межфразовых единств в крупные абзацы – многотемные блоки. Такие абзацы могут занимать не одну страницу текста. То же можно обнаружить в текстах Ф.М. Достоевского. Например, в «Записках из подполья» многие подглавкиоформлены как один-единственный абзац (см., в частности, подглавки V, VI первой главы и др.). Авторы менее крупных и, особенно, малых жанровых форм предпочитают абзацы тематически структурированные. Можно отметить и тот факт, что писатели современные значительно активнее используют абзацное членение, чем писатели XIX века. И это связано не только с индивидуальными пристрастиями, но и с общими тенденциями в синтаксисе современного русского языка: он становится более динамичным, расчлененным и актуализированным.

Кроме того, наблюдения показывают, что в разных изданиях одних и тех же произведений можно обнаружить несовпадающее разбиение текста на абзацы. Следовательно, нельзя сбрасывать со счетов и издательскую практику (особенно это касается массовых изданий).

Все это еще и еще раз свидетельствует, что абзацное членение, в отличие от семантико-синтаксического, гораздо субъективнее.

Однако эта субъективность не мешает проявлению общих закономерностей построения текста, нарушение которых воспринимается как следствие недостаточной продуманности при его оформлении. Так, например, в следующем тексте нарушен общий принцип абзацного членения, избранный самим автором (пятый и седьмой абзацы излишни; ср. построение третьего абзаца).

Перед дальней дорогой

On the second day, Ravi and Shashi arrived in the big city - Bombay. Their carriage was driven to the seaport and put on a siding. But it turned out that the journey was not over yet.

They began to wander to cook on a long journey.

Saws and axes rustled in the port. These carpenters and carpenters constructed special cages for Ravi and Shashi. Comfortable, spacious cage must be for elephants and necessarily durable. Therefore, they were made not from ordinary boards, but from the strongest “iron tree” in India.

Started in the workshop sewing machines.

This tailors sewed special blankets for Ravi and Shashi. Comfortable, beautiful should be blankets for elephants and be sure to warm. Therefore, sewed blankets from the warmest wool.

Trucks roared in the port.

Это шоферы подвозили к причалу рис и сахар, тростник и молоко, ананасы и фисташки, стебли бананового дерева, зеленую траву и сухое сено. Пусть будут сытыРави и Шаши во время путешествия, пусть едят себе на здоровье самую лакомую пищу (С. Баруздин).