Английского

§ 8. Neither cumulemes, nor paragraphs form the upper limit of 
textual units of speech. Paragraphs are connected within the 
framework of larger elements of texts making up different para-
graph groupings. Thus, above the process of cumulation as syntac-
tic connection of separate sentences, supra-cumulation should be 
discriminated as connection of cumulemes and paragraphs into lar-
ger textual unities of the correspondingly higher subtopical status. 
Cf.: 
... That first slip with my surname was just like him; and after-
wards, particularly when he was annoyed, apprehensive, or guilty 
because of me, he frequently called me Ellis. 
So, in the smell of Getliffe's tobacco, I listened to him as he pro-
duced case after case, sometimes incomprehensibly, because of his 
allusive slang, often inaccurately. He loved the law (C. P. Snow). 

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In the given example, the sentence beginning the second paragraph 
is cumulated (i.e. supra-cumulated) to the previous paragraph, thus 
making the two of them into a paragraph grouping. 
Moreover, even larger stretches of text than primary paragraph 
groupings can be supra-cumulated to one another in the syntactic 
sense, such as chapters and other compositional divisions. For in-
stance, compare the end of Chapter XXIII and the beginning of 
Chapter XXIV of J. Galsworthy's "Over the River": 
Chapter XXIII. ... She went back to Condaford with her father by 
the morning train, repeating to her Aunt the formula: "I'm not go-
ing to be ill." 
Chapter XXIV. But she was ill, and for a month in her conven-
tional room at Condaford often wished she were dead and done 
with. She might, indeed, quite easily have died... 
Can, however, these phenomena signify that the sentence is simply 
a sub-unit in language system, and that "real" informative-syntactic 
elements of this system are not sentences, but various types of cu-
mulemes or supra-cumulemes? — In no wise. 
Supra-sentential connections cannot be demonstrative of the 
would-be "secondary", "sub-level" role of the sentence as an ele-
ment of syntax by the mere fact that all the cumulative and occur-
sive relations in speech, as we have seen from the above analysis, 
are effected by no other unit than the sentence, and by no other 
structure than the inner structure of the sentence; the sentence re-
mains the central structural-syntactic element in all the formations 
of topical significance. Thus, even in the course of a detailed study 
of various types of supra-sentential constructions, the linguist 
comes to the confirmation of the classical truth that the two basic 
units of language are the word and the sentence: the word as a unit 
of nomination, the sentence as a unit of predication. And it is 
through combining different sentence-predications that topical re-
flections of reality are achieved in all the numerous forms of lin-
gual intercourse. 

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