oo has claimed that discourse communities can be healthy and yet contain contradic- tions;

Except in exceptional cases of well-knit groups of advanced students already familiar with much of the material, an academic class is unlikely to be a discourse community at the outset.

Memberships of hobby groups may be quite peripheral, while memberships of professional associations may be closely connected to the business of a career

that individuals may belong to several discourse communities and (b) that individuals will vary in the number of discourse com- munities they belong to and hence in the number of genres they command.

On the other hand, distance between members geographically, ethnically and socially presumably means that they do not form a speech community.

These occur in members’ collections, whether for display or not, and are found in somewhat more abbreviated forms in specialized auction catalogues, as in the following example:

these brief facts to show that the members of the discourse community have, superficially at least, nothing in common except their shared hobby interest,

How- ever, survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts.

Most commonly, however, the inbuilt dynamic towards an increasingly shared and specialized terminology is realized through the development of community-specific abbreviations and acro- nyms.

genres that articulate the opera- tions of the discourse community.

hus, membership implies uptake of the informational opportunities. Individuals might pay an annual subscription to the Acoustical Society of America but if they never open any of its communications they can- not be said to belong to the discourse community, even though they are formally members of the society.

they all have lines of commu- nication back to base, and presumably acquired discourse community membership as a key element in their initial training.

A speech community typically inherits its member- ship by birth, accident or adoption; a discourse community recruits its mem- bers by persuasion, training or relevant qualification.

In a discourse community, the com- municative needs of the goals tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics.

In a socio- linguistic speech community, the communicative needs of the group, such as socialization or group solidarity, tend to predominate in the development and maintenance of its discoursal characteristics.

A speech community is defined, then, tautologically but radically, as a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech.

then it becomes reasonable to expect it to be, if not a settled notion, at least one that is sufficiently explicit for others to be able to accept, modify or reject on the basis of the criteria proposed.

hey point us towards asking how a particular discourse community uses its discoursal conventions to initiate new members or how the discourse of another reifies particular values or beliefs.