ABSTRACT

Some linguists confine their studies to the formulation of rules for the selection and combination of units below the sentence. They regard the sentence as the upper limit of linguistic enquiry on the assumption that rules governing the combination of sentences-if they exist at all-must make appeal to areas other than the linguistic: the shared situational, cultural and world knowledge of the participants. When this is taken into account, the perception of connections between sentences varies from participant to participant-what appears connected to one speaker may not appear so to another-so both language and participants must be described. The resultant proliferation of variables has led some linguists to the hasty conclusion that there are no rules above the sentence, while others have attempted to extend to discourse the kind of rules which apply within sentences, but are quite alien to the open, context-dependent and indeterminate nature of discourse. The idea that discourse may be governed by factors which vary between people and places is quite alien to ‘scientific’ linguistics. Ironically, the ‘harder’ natural sciences and mathematics, from which it derived its approach, have more easily accepted relativity.