Discourse, of Course: An overview of research in discourse studies

A multiple invitation to discourse studies
Jan Renkema
1. How this book came to being
The study of discourse now has a fixed position in academic programs in communication
science all over the world. In many freshman and bachelor courses introductory
lectures are given, and in many master programs students spend a few months on
special topics related to discourse in communication.
In 2004, the revised edition of Introduction to Discourse Studies appeared, a result
of almost twenty-five years of academic and non-academic teaching about discourse.
It was a renewal of Renkema (1992), which has been reprinted and translated several
times over. The revised edition has found its place in many education programs.
This book is a kind of follow-up on that introduction, which was meant for undergraduate
programs. It is a collection of twenty short papers, a capita selecta course,
and is written for graduate programs. The selection of the twenty chapters was made
on the basis of insights gained in contacts with fellow researchers whom I met while I
was working as a guest professor at various universities in different parts of the world.
I invited colleagues who have influenced and stimulated me in my work to write an
invitation to theirs in their own area of discourse studies. This book, the result of that
invitation, is a critical overview of stimulating ideas from leading persons in the field.
The aim of this book is threefold:
a. presenting material for advanced courses in discourse studies;
b. unfolding a stimulating display of research projects to future PhD students;
c. giving an overview of new developments after the 2004 introduction.
This publication is motivated by the need of teachers to have a state-of-the-art overview
of the main topics in the field, and by the need of advanced students to acquire
standards for developing research plans, in theses or dissertations. It gives a combination
of approaches from very different schools in discourse studies, ranging from
argumentation theory to genre theory, from multimodal metaphors to cognitive approaches
to coherence analysis. This book not only serves as a textbook, but also as a
kind of reference book for researchers who want to have an update for various main
topics in the field.