From: Trevor Peterson (06PETERSON@cua.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 14:37:56 EDT
>===== Original Message From Randy Leedy <Rleedy@bju.edu> =====
>Trevor, thanks for the reply.
>
>Yes, there's a circularity here. If I may try to defend myself a
>further step, I'd say that the rough difference between a sentence and
>a paragraph is that a sentence is a unified collection of clauses
>where a paragraph is a unified collection of sentences. The grammarian
>is called upon to exercise a subjective judgment of what constitutes a
>unit of a particular "size." He asks, "Where does this 'unit' round
>itself off to a satisfying degree of completeness and then proceed to
>the next?"
But I think the contention has been that this subjectivity needlessly
complicates grammatical analysis. With regard to paragraphs, I've seen it
myself in exegetical class exercises where we'd try to identify the
"paragraph" (pericope, teaching portion, etc.). If it's true that a discourse
can be outlined to some advantage, we had no choice but to run up against the
question of which outline level constitutes a paragraph. In the same way, it
seems that what might be defined as a small paragraph could equally be defined
as a long sentence. Indeed, these are issues on which English versions such
as the KJV and the NIV show clear difference. But my point is this--if
sentences are connected logically, and clauses within sentences are connected
logically using similar or identical means of connection, how can the
distinction amount to anything tangible?
>I think that the sentence is a helpful unit in that it
>supplies a usefully sized chunk larger than the phrase or clause and
>smaller than the paragraph or discourse. It's not clear to me that
>your logic would allow for the isolation of units of any size larger
>than the word and shorter than the discourse.
I don't quite see how you get that. My main point is that we could probably
get along quite well if we went straight from the clause level past the
sentence to whatever came next. At least clauses can be defined
syntactically.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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