What is discourse and how has the new interdisciplinary field of discourse studies developed? What are the linguistic and other structures of discourse at various levels of analysis? How do people - and their minds - go about producing, understanding and remembering text or talk? How are these mental processes interactionally shaped? Covering a variety of genres, both written and spoken, this volume explains how discourse is organized, how discursive form and meaning are related and what the functions are of style and rhetoric in the communicative context. This volume is the first of two books in "Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction". The second volume is "Discourse as Social Interaction". Each volume can be read independently; together, they form a comprehensive survey of the field.