This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry
variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar,
functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics. An attempt is made to develop
a fairly abstract unified theoretical frame- work for the description of
discourse which actually helps explain concrete facts of the discourse
grammar of a naturallanguage.2 This plan is reflected in the division of
the study into two parts. In the first part, a semiformal framework for
describing conversational discourse is developed in some detail. In the
second part, this framework is applied to the functional syntax of
English. The relation of the discourse grammar of Part II to the
descriptive frame- work of Part I can be instructively compared to the
relation of Tarskian semantics to model theory. Tarski's semantics
defmes a concept of truth of a sentence in a model, an independently
identified construct. Analogously, my rules of discourse grammar defme a
concept of appropriateness of a sentence to a given context. The task of
the first Part of the essay is to characterize the relevant notion of
context. Although my original statement of the problem was linguistic -
how to describe the meaning, or function, of certain aspects of word
order and intonation - Part I is largely an application of various
methods and results of philosophical logic. The justification of the
interdisciplinary approach is the simplicity and naturalness of the
eventual answers to specific linguistic problems in Part II.
