Discourse, as the term appears in the title, and as it is used in the papers collected here. . . . refers to both text and talk, and these not as two separate genres to be compared and contrasted, but rather as overlapping aspects of a single entity. As the object of study, spoken discourse is 'text', much as words spoken in a speech are commonly referred to as the text of the speech. In this sense, 'discourse' and 'text' are synonymous.