ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relation between discourse and linguistic theory. It presents a brief survey of some of the pertinent literature. The chapter examines a few well-known proposals in light of these issues. It provides a handful of proposals for treating discourse properties as linguistic properties, or language-like properties. The first American linguist to attempt the analysis of connected discourse as discourse was probably Fries. Linguistic theories of discourse are a relatively recent development in linguistics. It was not until the 1960s that texts or discourse generally came to be considered an object of linguistic analysis. Harweg takes substitution to be the most important innovation in the development of text-linguistics. Any discourse can be described in terms of content, presentational structure, and linguistic form. The distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge is a crucial one, for both theoretical and practical reasons. The chapter provides some general conclusions and suggests some directions for theoretical development.
