Evaluative prosody: the construction of events and processes in the discourse of history

Abstract

This article examines the categories of the semantic domain of APPRECIATION of the Appraisal Theory to analyze social, political and/or economic events and processes in the discourse of history. The corpus is composed by specialized discourses of recent Chilean history (1970-1990) written by historians and sociologists. The construction of interpretations regarding historical memories in this type of discourse has the tendency to make explicit authors’ ideological stances, which legitimate or deslegitimate certain views of the past in the discourse through the evaluation of historical individual and collective actors, events and processes, as well as notions of disciplinary technicality. We postulate that the categories of Power, Conflictivity, Valuation and Integrity, as a reelaboration of the system network of the semantic domain of APPRECIATION allow to take into account in a more specific manner the particularity and complexity of the processual cline (events, processes, situations) of the historical discourse, and that the first two dimensions, Power and Conflictivity, have special recurrence in the construction of historical explanations of the recent Chilean past.