Acknowledgements

This volume arises out of a seminar on ‘Structures in Discourse’ organized by the editors on 13–14 June, 2022, at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, in which many contributors to this volume participated in person and others joined online. These contributions have thus been presented already once in oral form, supported by textual, visual and audio materials. In this volume, they are presented a second time, now in written format, including text and graphics. The process of producing the articles illustrates the adaptability of academic discourse to varying contexts in different media. What the end product cannot successfully show is the process of producing the volume, which has involved interaction between the contributors, the editors, and a number of other actors, a variety of illocutionary acts, partially shared contexts, as well as meetings online and in the real world.

The editors wish to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved for making this process a congenial and collegial one: the seminar participants and the contributors to the volume, the department interns Lisa Martin-Harewood, Anna Swanström, Lucas Westerholm, and Emilia Holmberg, the two anonymous reviewers, and the series editors Anita Fetzer and Miriam Locher, as well as the acquisitions editor Isja Conen at John Benjamins. We are grateful to the H. W. Donner Foundation of the Åbo Akademi University Foundation for financial support for organizing the seminar.

In terms of illocutionary acts, this volume is both a representative and an expressive act. The contributions are representations of states of affairs concerning structures in discourse, which have truth value that other linguists can test by studying those structures and their signals in further data. The individual contributions and the whole volume are intended as an expressive illocutionary act: their purpose is to honour the person, and her work, for whom the volume has been collected. We are happy to present this volume to the general public and to Tuija Virtanen, whose work is the inspiration for this collection, and we hope that the intensions of both the contributors and the editors are clear.