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The discipline of history has had its ‘narrative turn’ and its ‘linguistic turn’, with historians intensely debating the status of writing within ‘doing history’. Nevertheless, linguists have not devoted much time to studying history writing (although they have studied other registers intensively). This course therefore aims at an exploration of the text-linguistic analysis of historical discourse. Proceding from the idea that history writing is telling a story in representing/referring to the past world, is aiming to provide an explanation for the narrated ‘facts’ and to give meaning to them, and always bearing in mind that the historical author is unavoidably ‘positioned’ (cf. Munslow 2007), we may identify the following as potential objects of study:
- how is the presentation realised: the text-typological characteristics of history writing, i.e. narrative, expository, and argumentative textual components;
- how is the past represented or transformed: treatment of place, time, character(s), (concrete) actions, and (abstract) processes;
- how is explanation provided and meaning established: causality, conditionality and counterfactuality, theme-rheme stuctures;
- how does the position of the historical author become apparent (or his hidden): appraisal system, stance, and metadiscourse.
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