ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some empirical endeavors in the investigation of discourse and structure that answer such questions as how grammar constitutes a key resource for structuring narratives and organizing interaction, how different text types or genres are structured and how such structures may vary across communities and, finally, how gaze and gesture are describable by their own structural properties. A community of practice has three dimensions: mutual engagement (regular interaction), joint enterprise (shared goals), and shared repertoire. One text type that appears to vary across cultures is that of expository writing. Expository writing in English is believed to follow a linear structure. To understand the structure of text types, for example, the identification of rhetorical moves and linguistics devices seems to be the most reasonable and viable approach. In a similar vein, using descriptive statistics to establish the regularity of conversational historical present (CHP) in performed narratives is arguably the best option.
