ABSTRACT
Discourse analysts have made illuminating discoveries about the structure of text, talk, and nonverbal conduct. The author introduces some classics in the study of discourse and structure and has chosen to define "classics" as early works that are widely cited or continue to have an impact on current research practices. He considers seminal works addressed to the structure of narrative, the structure of conversation, the structure of classroom discourse, the structure of text, and the structure of nonverbal conduct, thus moving from talk, to text and, finally, to conduct beyond talk and text. Narrative is a method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses that contains at least one temporal juncture to the sequence of events which actually occurred. Macrostructures may be informally and intuitively thought of as theme, topic, upshot, or gist. They may be expressed by topical words or sentences, summaries, short paraphrases, and conclusions.
