Parafermionic character formulae

We study various aspects of parafermionic theories such as the precise field content, a description of a basis of states (that is, the counting of independent states in a freely generated highest-weight module) and the explicit expression of the parafermionic singular vectors in completely irreducible modules. This analysis culminates in the presentation of new character formulae for the $Z_N$ parafermionic primary fields. These characters provide novel field theoretical expressions for $\su(2)$ string functions.