Communities of practice, communities of discourse, and text communities between synchrony and diachrony

This article provides a concise overview of the concepts of community of practice, community of discourse and textual community, with particular reference to their potential applications in the field of historical sociolinguistics. A concise examination of the existing literature reveals that the inclination to reorganize communities of practice, on the one hand, and discourse and textual communities on the other, emerges quite frequently in a relationship of inclusive specification. From this perspective, textual communities, in particular, are often conceptualized as communities of practice centered around a specific text or textual corpus to which reference is made.