The specialized linguistic corpus of a disciplinary or professional enterprise. Discourse designates the language practice of a scholarly or professional community, including a shared vocabulary, as well as a common tone or style. In this sense, discourse can be figured as the dialect or idiom of a given BIBLIOGRAPHY and the questions, issues, and topics it circumscribes. Discourse is the medium for conversation among members of a particular DISCIPLINE or PROFESSION. Literary discourse, then, exists alongside legal discourse, while macroscopic entities (e.g., the humanities at large), institutions (e.g., the United Nations), and conceptual categories (e.g., aesthetics) can also be discursive. Accordingly, discourses can be mutually intelligible and their terms, transferable; but discourses are nevertheless predicated on specificity insofar as they foster association and its obverse—exclusion. Within the academic setting (as in other socio-cognitive environments), a sense of disciplinary identity or “belonging” stipulates the existence of a community outside a given set of linguistic protocols, an “other” not privy to or fluent in the language of a certain intellectual conversation. As such, discourse represents a marker of distinction that serves a discriminating function across disciplines or among audiences for scholarship, despite the fact that varieties of discourse proliferate and ostensibly coincide. Membership in a disciplinary community requires a process of linguistic acculturation whereby a scholar becomes attuned to the relevant specialized registers of various words, phrases, concepts, or expressions—a dynamic rather incandescently on display in this very paragraph and elsewhere in the present volume.