The paper strives to uncover the leading paragraph build-up patterns in academic discourse. It employs the framework pioneered by Mathesius (1942/1982) and Daneš (1994, 1995) and elaborated on by Pípalová (2005, 2008, 2014). The paper explores a specialized corpus composed of three distinct sections of research articles.
The paper confirms the general prevalence of Broad P-theme paragraphs. It also demonstrates that non-canonical forms of paragraph build-up tend to prevail and identifies a number of factors at play.
Moreover, the paper shows that the distribution of paragraph patterns is not homogeneous, but appears to change across the space of research articles.