1. Acknowledgments; 2. A frame for windows: On studying texts and discourses of the past (by Peikola, Matti); 3. Discourse in the public sphere; 4. News discourse: Mass media communication from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century (by Jucker, Andreas H.); 5. Advertising discourse in eighteenth-century English newspapers (by Gotti, Maurizio); 6. Presidential inaugural addresses: A study in a genre development (by Kovalyova, Natalia); 7. Freedom of speech at stake: Fallacies in some political discourses in the Early Republic (by Rudanko, Juhani); 8. Text-initiating strategies in eighteenth-century newspaper headlines (by Studer, Patrick); 9. Science and academia; 10. Patterns of agentivity and narrativity in early science discourse (by Dorgeloh, Heidrun); 11. The economics academic lecture in the nineteenth century: Marshall's Lectures to Women (by Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella); 12. Contesting authorities: John Wilkins' use of and attitude towards the Bible, the classics and contemporary science in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) (by Oja, Marko); 13. Personal pronouns in argumentation: An early tobacco controversy (by Ratia, Maura); 14. Criticism under scrutiny: A diachronic and cross-cultural outlook on academic conflict (1810-1995) (by Salager-Meyer, Francoise); 15. The underlying pattern of the Renaissance botanical genrepinax (by Selosse, Philippe); 16. Genres and the appropriation of science: Loci communes in English in the late medieval and early modern period (by Taavitsainen, Irma); 17. Letters and litterature; 18. Chaucer's narrators and audiences: Self-deprecating discourse in Book of the Duchess and House of Fame (by Foster, Michael); 19. Discourse on a par with syntax, or the effects of the linguistic organisation of letters on the diachronic characterisation of the text type (by Perez-Guerra, Javier); 20. Verba sic spernit mea: The usage of rupture of coherence in Seneca's tragedies (by Speyer, Augustin); 21. Discourse and pragmatics; 22. 'Ther been thinges thre, the whiche thynges troublen al this erthe': The discourse-pragmatics of 'demonstrative which' (by Bergs, Alexander); 23. Processes underlying the development of pragmatic markers: The case of (I) say (by Brinton, Laurel J.); 24. From certainty to doubt: The evolution of the discourse marker voire in French (by Rodriguez Somolinos, Amalia); 25. Politeness as a distancing device in the passive and in indefinite pronouns (by Toyota, Jun-ichi); 26. Language contact and discourse; 27. Discourse features of code-switching in legal reports in late medieval England (by Davidson, Mary Catherine); 28. Focusing strategies in Old French and Old Irish (by Wehr, Barbara); 29. Medieval mixed-language business discourse and the rise of Standard English (by Wright, Laura); 30. Author Index; 31. Subject Index