Introduction

Discourse analysis is a sub–field of linguistics which can be approached from many different directions, involving a large variety of different methods. In most of the work reported in this book, discourse refers to written monologue. For the purposes of this introduction, we thus largely concentrate on text and use the terms discourse and text interchangeably. Specifically, this volume collects psycholinguistic studies, investigations of logical and computational models of discourse, corpus studies, and linguistic case studies of language-specific devices. However, this variety of approaches only reflects the complexity of discourse production and understanding, and the necessity of understanding the interplay of diverse parameters in these processes.