Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 November 2008
For centuries linguists in theoretical linguistics and contrastive analysis have confined themselves to the sentence boundary. This selfimposed restriction is, no doubt, the result of the view, sustained since classical times, that language is a self-contained system, a mechanism for producing and comprehending sentences. The study of discourse was, untill recently, left to scholars from fields such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism who were interested in language.