Discourse, of Course comes after Jan Renkema's Introduction to Discourse Studies (2004) for undergraduates. The new book is a collection of twenty short papers. It is a capita selecta course and meant for graduate programs. The aim of this book is threefold:
to present material for advanced courses in discourse studies;
to unfold a stimulating display of research projects to future PhD students;
to give an overview of new developments after the 2004
Introduction to Discourse Studies.
This publication fulfills both the teacher's need for a state-of-the-art overview of the main topics in discourse, and the student's need to acquire standards for developing research plans in theses and dissertations. It gives a combination of approaches from very different schools in discourse studies, ranging from argumentation theory to genre theory, from the study of multimodal metaphors to cognitive approaches to coherence analysis. This book is not only meant to serve as a textbook, but also as a reference book for researchers who want an update for various main topics in the field.