What do paragraph divisions indicate in narrative texts?

This paper reports on a study that concerns the discourse functions of paragraph divisions in narrative texts. By conducting two segmentation tasks the study obtains both episode and paragraph divisions of the unparagraphed versions of 10 English narrative texts. The episode divisions, which represent the points of thematic discontinuities in the narrative texts, are compared with the paragraph divisions, which, as conventionally used, organize the narrative texts into intermediate structural units. The comparison of the two groups of divisions indicates that the great majority of the paragraph divisions serve to mark the thematic discontinuities of various kinds as reflected in the episode divisions. More specifically, the paragraph divisions are found to be used consistently in marking the thematic discontinuities associated with the prototypical episodes. They are used less consistently yet frequently in marking the thematic discontinuities associated with the subepisodes.