Discourse analysis encompasses a diversity of approaches which can be applied across disparate monolgues, interactions, settings, and populations. This special issue reflects this diversity in the qualitative and quantitative approaches to analysis employed, the range of discourse features addressed, and the variety of communicative interactions elicited and sampled. International contributors share their knowledgeof the analysis and treatment of communicative interactions as applied to people with aphasia, right hemisphere brain damage, head injury and the non-brain damged population. This issue presents an overview of contemporary research, clinical discourse analysis thinking, and future directions that theory development and empirical efforts might take.