Discourse is language as it occurs in any form or context beyond the speech act. It may be
written or spoken monological or dialogical but there is always a communicative aim or
purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying
discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches
developed for the analysis of discourse including among others conversation analysis
systemic-functional analysis genre analysis critical discourse analysis corpus-driven
approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse
such as discourse markers moves speech act sequences discourse phases and silence. The final
section of the volume examines discourse types and domains providing a taxonomy of discourse
types and focusing on a range of discourse domains e.g. classroom discourse medical discourse
legal discourse electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the
respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.
