First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How do social situations influence language use, discourse and conversation? This book is a monograph which presents a multidisciplinary theory of context and the way context influences language use and discourse. Unlike in earlier approaches, contexts are not defined as objective social 'variables', such as gender or age. Rather, they are constructs of the participants themselves, that is, 'subjective definitions of the communicative situation' that are made explicit in the sociocognitive notion of context models. These models dynamically control all language use, make sure that discourses...

A collection of innovative essays representing the most recent developments in poetry as discourse, the discourse of power, and discourse of psychiatry and psychosis. The essays in this volume deal with questions of interpretation of poetry, psychoanalysis, and political theory. All are presented here as appropriate objects of discourse studies which go beyond conventional analysis.