dimensionality of discourse

The paragraph spaces of five text corpora, of different genres and intended audiences, in four different languages, all show the same two-scale structure, with the dimension at short distances being lower than at long distances. In all five cases the short-distance dimension is approximately eight. Control simulations with randomly permuted word instances do not exhibit a low dimensional structure. The observed topology places important constraints on the way in which authors construct prose, which may be universal.