On Mon, February 28, 2011 5:45 am, Carlo Traverso wrote:
The point for me is rather that we have two different concepts: the chapter header, that can be empty, (displayed as vertical space) or contain several items, including a title (often a short paragraph, but may also consist of more than one paragraph), and identifier (usually a number), a summary, an epigraph, etc. The TOC should point to the chapter header, not the chapter title, that often is missing.
I /really/ like this concept, and would support it 110%.
A chapter body (that follows the header, and in extreme cases may be empty) is usually composed of paragraphs, but may contain other things, for example a chapter in a book of poetry does not contain paragraphs.
Yes, a chapter need not exclusively consist of paragraphs. Other structures may also be included in chapters.
And I think that the wikipedia definition is too narrow, if not just wrong.
And yet, this definition is repeated in virtually every dictionary I have looked at, sometimes drawn even more narrowly.
I have seen paragraphs (in dialogue) that consist just of
--...
It is usual in French texts to preface quoted text with a horizontal bar or quotation dash (―). In this case, I suspect that what you have identified as a paragraph is shorthand for "Noun stood silently, pensive." I'm willing to accept text marked as paragraphs which do not meet the formal requirements if they obviously serve the same purpose, and could be replace with a true paragraph without changing the meaning of the prose. In other cases, I think you have probably seen blocks of text which have many of the same presentational qualities as paragraphs, but which are not. (I generally refer to these things as "anonymous blocks", from the TEI specification). As you point out, chapters need not need to be composed /exclusively/ of paragraphs, so placing some of these other constructs in a chapter is not objectionable. To me, the key is to identify these constructs as what they are, not how they look on a page.
The distinctive character of a paragraph is IMHO the display, you can run two paragraphs together and obtain one paragraph, only with changes in whitespace. Hence a paragraph is a typographical unit, not necessarily a logical unit (even if good typography usually makes paragraph breaks coincide with logical units). The fact that usually the paragraph breaks are decided by the author does not contradict that it is a typographical concept.
Here we must simply agree to disagree (and you are also disagreeing with every English teacher I have ever had, who were constant berating "run-on paragraphs"). I simply cannot accept the notion that a paragraph is merely a typographical convention. Cheers, Lee