The terms professional communication or professional discourse are relatively recent notions in the field of discourse studies in Spanish. As López Ferrero (2002) points out, they were first used to replace the notions languages or communication for specific purposes to show the more discursive orientation of these studies, as opposed to research that was at the beginning focused on terminological and stylistic studies. In this chapter, we present a review of recent research on this discursive macrogenre, aiming to illustrate the two following aspects: on one hand the changes as to theoretical-methodological perspective in the last two decades and the most frequently studied discourse genres, with an ever clearer tendency towards interdisciplinarity and towards the combination of discourse studies from a critical perspective, the ethnographic orientation, and the rhetorical-argumentative dimension, and, on the other hand, the analysis of the communicative and persuasive strategies in the professional discourses analysed by the authors and by other researchers, taking into account situations of conflict – i.e. employee-client communication, professional discourses in the public sphere (mainly by multinational corporations), or conflict between capitalism and other forms of businesses, among others.
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