A new ‘revolution’ in linguistics?-‘text-grammars’ vs. ‘sentence-grammars’

Some of the arguments presented in favor of a replacement of the existing ‘sentence-grammars’ by a ‘text-grammar’ (a grammar whose rules would generate a set of well-formed ‘texts’, and not merely a set of well-formed ‘sentences’) are discussed and evaluated. Three main arguments in favor of T-grammar are put forward in one of the most comprehensive expositions of the subject (van Dijk, 1972): a methodological, a grammatical and a psycholinguistic argument. The paper examines in detail only the first two, showing that none of them provides satisfactory support for the replacement of S-grammar by T-grammar.