ABSTRACT
In contrast to the predominant sentence-level orientation of American linguistics, European linguists have studied for many years linguistic phenomena beyond sentence boundaries. By and large, analyses of discourse features in technical writing have been informed by linguistic theory aimed at describing sentences, not whole pieces of discourse. M. Gopnik based her linguistic study of scientific texts on transformational grammar, providing extensive data on the types of syntactic structures in scientific writing but offering little explanation of why particular structures are used. While teachers of technical writing have long been concerned with the efficient transmission of information, little research has addressed what particular discourse features influence efficient communication. Members of the Prague School such as F. Danes, P. Sgall, E. Hajicova, and E. Benesovs, and other linguists, have pointed out that in addition to having syntactic structures. Texts have a topical structure that carries theme or topic through the text and that controls the placement of information relevant to the topic.
