Definition of Paragraph in Persian prose

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor of Shiraz University

10.29252/kavosh.2010.2505

Abstract

The lack of paragraph spacing in post-Islamic Persian manuscripts has caused some people to think that there is not the paragraph in Persian prose at all. To show how this fallacy is rude, we have tried first to explain the concept of paragraph as an indispensable discourse unit that can be or not marked formally as only a question of punctuation. Then reviewing the history of paragraphos sign in old Greek, we have pointed that even from a historic point of view there are proofs from Avesta text and the Achaemenian inscriptions to demonstrate the consciousness of pre-Islamic writer toward the paragraphing the texts by sign "... " or simply by spacing between the paragraphs. In Pehlevid text one can discover how the rhetorical and linguistic paragraph-markers such as -a kind of-"and" replace the spacing. The most interesting finding in this article is the continuation of this tradition in post Islamic Persian prose while the great Persian writer insist to begin the most their paragraphs by this special "and" unrecognized by now.    

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