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Abstract: The article deals with the parcellated construction as a special device of a paradoxical, destructive and constructive nature. The parts of the parcellated construction, the base and the parcel, are the elements of a coherent text performing a cohesive function and providing its coherence. The aim of the study is to reveal the positions of the parts of the parcellated construction as a global component of discourse, a paragraph, and its role in the semantic structure of the text. The empirical base of the research is a corpus of texts with parcellated constructions, selected by the continuous sampling method from the sites of contemporary French newspapers. The analysis of this special-purpose corpus is made by means of discursive and cognitive methods. The analyses of speech contexts and the treatment of the corpus are made by means of the special computer program Linguistica. The analysis of the material enables to reveal four basic positions of the parcellated construction: initial, intraparagraphic, final and interparagraphic. Depending on the position, the parts of the construction realize the development of the deep-laid semantic structure of the text, horizontal and/or vertical. At the same time the formal grammatical coherence may assume different language forms, specified by the kind of the construction. The results of the undertaken research can be used in teaching text linguistics, theory of grammar, cognitive linguistics, in the further development of the theory of parcellation and its cognitive and discursive potential.