Jan Renkema in Lugano

Jan Renkema (www.janrenkema.nl ) will be in Lugano from March 15 to March 24, hosted by the Institute for Linguistic and semiotic (Prof. A. Rocci)

He will teach a doctoral course on the topic: "The texture of discourse. Towards an outline of connectivity theory" on March 16, 17 and 23.

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Jan Renkema (1948) is a professor of Discourse Quality at Tilburg University. He studied General Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and received his Ph.D. in 1981 with a dissertation on 'The Language of Government'. He has acted as linguistic advisor to the Dutch Parliament and was a professor of Cultural Studies at the Open University of The Netherlands.
Among his writings for a broader audience are a Dutch style manual, of which more than 400,000 copies have been sold. For colleagues and students he wrote an introduction to the field of text linguistics, which was translated into English as 'Discourse Studies: An Introductory Textbook' as well as into Spanish, Korean and Japanese. He has been a Fullbright Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and has given guest lectures at universities in Buenos Aires, Kunming, Osaka, Saarbrücken, Seoul, Stellenbosch, Sydney and Valparaiso.
Other activities:
He was general editor of a popular Dutch monthly on language use, and author of the official word list as stipulated by the Dutch Spelling Law in 1994. Moreover he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Dutch University for Humanist Studies and supervisor of the New Dutch Bible translation.

Now he is acting as:

communications advisor for various government agencies;
a member of the editorial boards of a number of Dutch journals and of: Journal of Visual Communication, Journal of Web Based Communities, and Revista Signos,;
general editor of Information Design Journal;
chairman of the International Association for Dutch Studies