Internationally, there is increasing research and interest in the processes of the production and reception of texts for specific purposes and in the historical development of genres and registers within Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and the sociology of science.

Studies of professional communication have traditionally been biased towards the written medium and have been carried out with little, if any, connection to LSP. Disciplinary boundaries and interest groupings have thus kept these different approaches to the study of...