Robert Einarsson wrote:

> It has become apparent to me that there are two vital strands within
> grammar, one of which deals with clause-level grammar
> > and another which deals with discourse-level grammar.  Any discussion
> of  scope and sequence is going to have to take these strands into > consideration


> Personally, I thought that anything above the sentence level would
> really need another subject to discuss it, that "grammar" didn't apply.

Obviously, there are many constraints that operate at the sentence level
that don't operate above the sentence level.

I think of some of the relationships of pronouns that really are only
captured by the concept of the sentence.   Although she is before Monica
in both (1) and (2), in (1) she can not refer to Monica but, all else
being equal, she refers to Monica in (2).

1) She needs to make money, and Monica was interviewed on TV tonight.
2) Because she needs to make money, Monica was interviewed on TV
tonight.

This is not to say that there are not some interesting constraints that
cross sentence boundaries.  (The following example is in Birner and Ward
(1998), Information status and noncanonical word order in English, pp
60+)

There is a kind of affirmative preposing.

3) Inside the Coors truck was beer for the student's consumption.
Consume they did.

Notice that 'consume' can be preposed, but you can't prepose a
"morphologically distinct near-synonym for consume."

4) ?Drink they did.

Try this out and you will find very strong intuition about what kind of
preposing is possible.

It seems to me that if grammar is fundamentally about making meaning,
this morphological constraint should not exist.  And, of course, this
demonstrates that certain formal grammar constraints operate across
sentence boundaries.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University