This chapter focuses on the role that discourse relations and structure play in a variety of phenomena of interest to semanticists and philosophers. Not only do discourse relations add semantic content above and beyond the individual propositions expressed by the utterances in a discourse, but they, and the complex structures to which they give rise, can influence the interpretations of individual utterances, having an effect on the very propositions the utterances are understood to express. In this chapter, we look in detail at how theories of discourse structure can be brought to bear on at-issue and non-at-issue content, using appositive relative clauses and discourse parenthetical reports as illustrations. We also discuss recent efforts to use discourse structure to model conversational goals and capture the subjective nature of discourse interpretation as well as recent work extending theories of discourse structure to multimodal discourse. Along the way, we emphasize the importance of corpus work in studying discursive phenomena and raise a series of large questions to be pursued in future work.

In this chapter we will discuss how scholarly understandings of academic discourse have shifted over the past thirty years in response to increasing globalization and changes in theorizations of language. We will look at how the definition of and boundaries around academic discourse have widened, shifting from a singular academic discourse to plural discourses, and from a focus on language to a focus on practices, in the process of accommodating more diverse Englishes. In particular, we will consider how the study of academic discourse has exposed the increasingly blurry boundaries not only between languages but also between modes, and how discourse includes not only text but also other resources for making meaning, such as images, sound, gesture and material artifacts. We will consider how English’s role as the academic lingua franca has influenced these shifting definitions and concepts. Finally, we will consider the implications of this diversification for pedagogy and for frameworks for future discourse studies.