History as Discourse: Construals of Time, Cause and Appraisal

This thesis is concerned with making explicit the role that language plays in apprenticing social subjects into different social or 'discourse' communities. It focuses specifically on the textual and rhetorical strategies of school history texts written by students, aiming to bring a close linguistic analysis of the texts into relationship with the wider social and cultural context. In particular it focuses on three semantic domains. These are Cause, Time and an area of interpersonal evaluation known as Appraisal.The main questions addressed are How do the semantic motifs of Cause, Time and Appraisal function within the discourse of school history? How are they grammatically and lexically realised? What are the semantic and grammatical shifts and interactions that occur as a result of students moving through the different levels of their apprenticeship? In order to answer these questions the analytical tools of systemic-functional grammar are applied to a corpus of texts produced within the context of Australian secondary schooling. These texts represent the range of written genres that history students need to produce in order to fulfil the objectives and outcomes of the history curriculum. A major feature of the research is the use of Appraisal theory, a framework recently developed in systemic-functional linguistics, for analysing the linguistic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgements and social valuations. This theory proves valuable in taking us beyond more traditional linguistic concerns with interpersonal meaning, which focus on modality and mood structure. The main findings of the linguistic analysis show that construals of Cause, Time and Appraisal are core linguistic tools both for interpreting the past and for persuading audiences of the validity of such interpretations. Analysis also reveals that induction into the (discourse) community of historians can be generally characterised as a process of the student expanding their repertoire of metaphorical and specialised language resources as they move from recording the past to arguing about the past.By providing a fine grained linguistic analysis of the different types of texts that make up school history writing, the research is able to provide insights into the apprenticeship process and into the function and role of history both within and beyond the school context. The major conclusion reached here is that history inducts students into an abstract world of grammatical metaphor and in so doing provides them with the linguistic means to talk about people and time as abstract entities. It also provides them with the positioning and persuading strategies (the intellectual flexibility) necessary for social positions of responsibility