What was the state of the art in the field of intonation and discourse a quarter of a century ago?

Actually there was no such field. At that time most linguists felt that it was possible to have language without intonation and therefore to do linguistics without it. In fact, some even thought it imperative to think of intonation, like phonetics, as being outside of language. Not only do we have influential articles, like Bolingers entitled Around the edge of language (1964), to remind us of this; it was (and still is) reflected institutionally in the fact that many renowned British universities had (and have) departments of Linguistics and Phonetics, the latter subsuming the study of intonation.