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"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously."
"Quadraplicity drinks procrastination."
"Thursday is in bed with Friday". (1981, p103)
Even if one tried to attach a metaphorical value to each and every
individual word in the above-cited examples, the meaning would still
remain vague, ambiguous and undecipherable. Consequently, the message,
which every utterance is supposed to carry, will not be communicated
simply because there is no message. From this we can infer that the
communicative message of an utterance is made explicit by the alliance
of its grammaticality and semanticity.
Sentence-based linguistics, as an established and self-contained
discipline, was born years ahead of textlinguistics or discourse
analysis. It possessed its own descriptional tools and terminology.
Linguistics, however, did not go beyond the boundaries of the sentence,
and the methods then known had not allowed it to describe the
structural relations between sentences in connected discourse. The
tools necessary for describing the structural relations in connected
pieces of writing or utterances were provided by discourse analysis
which Harris had suggested in 1952. Linguistic analysis, at the
sentential level, had failed to resolve the problem of structural
relations in verbal utterances extending beyond the limit and scope of
isolated sentences. The need arose for the formulation of a theory
which would focus on the text and not the sentence; hence the birth of
text-linguistics.
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