This collection of papers is dedicated to Don Walker. The technical content of the papers clearly reflects his guidance and direction; his understanding of the relevance of the theories from related disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy; and his dream of the future availability of electronic documents and the potential of this as a resource for corpus-based analysis. This led him to an interdisciplinary role as a primary mover in the push to standardize the acquisition and tagging of electronic text, an endeavour that brought together people from fields as distinct as publishing, the humanities and computer science. His widespread interests are mirrored in the collection of papers in this volume, which portray different approaches and different styles.