This chapter explores the development of empathy as a particular kind of historical sensibility that relates others’ historical experiences to interpreter’s affective semiotic processes. The chapter analyses negotiations of meaning about historical films in a university course to describe students’ affective involvement and moral engagement with the history of others. Learning about others’ history entails engaging in semiotic work to reconstruct past experiences which creates affordances for the past to become relevant in the present in axiological and affective terms. The chapter shows how through response papers and discussions about a film that depicts traumatic historical events, students display their positioning and the construction of axiological communities that connect past and present. The discourse analysis draws on the SFL concept of interpersonal meanings as construed through attitudes (Martin & White, 2005) and point of view (Unsworth, 2013) realising affective and moral orientations to others’ experience. The findings of this study offer some insights into Spanish interpersonal meaning-making resources and the potential of historical film as a tool to develop historical sensibility.

This chapter examines how the language resources used to incorporate written historical evidence contribute to the negotiation of values regarding Mapuche people in primary and secondary Chilean official history textbooks. The study considers as a starting point the broad categories proposed by the ENGAGEMENT subsystem of the APPRAISAL system (Martin & White, 2005). Then it explores in detail the metaphorical, more or less evident and non-metaphorical interpersonal and experiential realisations involved in ENGAGEMENT in Spanish, adopting an interstratal tension perspective on the relation between discourse semantics and lexicogrammar strata. The study shows that the monoglossic orientation as well as the heteroglossic orientation of dialogic contraction tend to be realised by history textbook authors through non-metaphorical realisations. However, the inclusion of external voices as [expand: attribute] tends to be done by both metaphorical and non-metaphorical experiential realisations, and also by lexicogrammatical structures that although they cannot be considered as interpersonal or experiential grammatical metaphors, make the external voices less ‘recoverable’.

This chapter aims to advance the exploration of history beyond SFL’s traditional understanding of it as a school subject. The chapter studies the role of history as part of a disciplinary domain in the humanities, addressing how it contributes to ‘cultivating the artist’ in a bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts in a Chilean university. This study integrates recent developments in systemic theory, particularly in relation to the discourse-semantics stratum. These developments offer interesting tools for examining history with a focus on genre, register, and discourse-semantics (Hao, 2020; Doran & Martin, 2021). The chapter analyses students’ writing at the initial stage of their curriculum, with the aim of identifying the nature of the historical genres that are emerging and their role in cultivating students’ gaze as artists-in-training. The chapter describes historical recounts through a metafunctionally diverse exploration of discourse semantic patterns in texts. This exploration contributes to providing an initial response to the questions what is history as a disciplinary domain? Is there something like ‘the history’, as a monolithic and single discipline?

This chapter explores the attitudinal resources in ancient Chinese history, based on focus texts extracted from Records of the Grand Historian. This book of history assumes historical significance in that it set the model for all subsequent official dynastic histories in China down to the seventeenth century. The study adopts a top-down perspective, approaching the focus texts from their genre and register features. Most chapters of the Records are biographical profiles of historical figures, and most of the biographies have a generic structure Orientation ^ Record ^ Evaluation. A particularly prominent feature of ancient Chinese histories represented by the Records is that they contain an explicit culminative stage of Evaluation, expressing the history writer’s attitude. The discourse analysis in relation to attitudes in this chapter is informed by the APPRAISAL systems of Martin and White (2005) . Through analysing the types and values of attitudes and their lexicogrammatical realisations in classical written Chinese, the study aims to facilitate an understanding of the genre of historical records of the Chinese imperial dynasties that prevailed for about two millennia, and an understanding of the social and cultural values in China that have been passed down from history to the present.

This chapter explores the cultivation of the value of unity in a secondary school history textbook in China by examining the chapters on the founding of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century by the Mongols. The study draws on the system of FIELD in register and APPRAISAL in discourse semantics. As for FIELD, in establishing static relations, the textbook applies shifts in the assigned temporal properties, which affords the reading of a continuous development of history made possible by geo-political unity. In construing dynamic relations, the historical activities are presented as linear, culminating in the unification of the Mongolian steppe and the whole country. In addition, activities are organised in linear series to construe assimilation of the various ethnic groups. As for APPRAISAL, the textbook positively appreciates the activity of unifying the Mongolian steppe and the country, and negatively appreciates wars and disunity. The analyses presented in this chapter show the crucial role of ideational resources (i.e. FIELD), as well as interpersonal resources (i.e. APPRAISAL) in aligning textbook readers into a community of shared values, which is an important aspect of representing minority history in a multi-ethnic country like China.

In this chapter, we explore how Mandarin Chinese is used to describe and taxonomise phenomena in history discourse. While Systemic Functional Linguistics has had a long tradition of studying history discourse, particularly in English and Spanish, the focus has been on historical events and their impact. We show in our study that building knowledge of history also involves reporting what things were like in the past. We analyse a pedagogic text describing the development of handicrafts during the period of the Western Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 24), a particularly prosperous period in Chinese history. We approach the identification of language resources from a ‘tri-stratal’ and ‘top-down’ perspective, taking into account threefold aspects of meaning-making, including the static knowledge structure in the subject area, the language resources organised in the unfolding of the discourse, and the grammatical resources organised in the clause. We reveal that each meaning-making level has its unique characteristics in construing description and taxonomisation.

The introductory chapter positions the volume in relation to the discussion of historical knowledge building from different perspectives, including the philosophy of history, history education, and knowledge structures from a sociological perspective. The chapter explains the usefulness of studying knowledge building in history from a functional linguistic perspective and provides an overview of the Systemic Functional Linguistics initiatives since the 1980s. It concludes with a preview of the contributory chapters in this collection.

‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ In using this phrase (a reappropriation of one written by Kipling), the pioneering postcolonial historian C. L. R. James synthesised his interpretation of the vital significance of cricket for the growing West Indian nationalism of the twentieth century (James, 1963). Yet for those not familiar with this work, the phrase likely gives little of this meaning or reveals any of its significance. This chapter explores how particular terminology, ways of speaking, and phrases such as this come to be imbued with deep uncommon-sense and values-based meaning in history. Through analysis using a developing model of tenor in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the chapter argues that such axiologically charged rhetoric functions in the humanities in ways like that of technicality in science. Using texts from James’ memoir Beyond a Boundary, it explores how a range of rhetorical strategies draw on the discourse semantic resources of CONNEXION that links stretches of text and APPRAISAL that evaluates and positions meanings in order to synthesise meaning and help transport it to other texts across contexts.

Chapter 4 examines social protocols in public discourse, representing the realm of ‘overly’ ordinary language use. The term ‘public discourse’ means both monologues and dialogues that take place in public, often through mediatised events or written (online) pieces which are available for, or even addressed to, members of the public. ‘Social protocols’ describe forms of language use associated with ‘politeness’ in public discourse specifically, where ‘politeness’ in the interpersonal sense is hardly needed, i.e., such forms at first sight may seem to be entirely ‘superfluous’ if not ‘redundant’. Because if this, while social protocols and mediatised public aggression (studied in Chapter 3) may appear to have little in common at first sight, interestingly both of them have an ‘unreasonable’ element. This sense of unreasonableness however dissolves once one looks at such forms of language use through the ritual perspective. As a case study, Chapter 4 examines the ritual conventions of social protocols in a corpus of Chinese public announcements made in the wake of a major social crisis.

Chapter 5 focuses on the phenomenon of mimesis. All rituals are mimetic because ritual language use itself triggers replication and reciprocation. However, Chapter 5 will show that in various interactionally complex rituals one can observe a specific mimetic phenomenon – ‘performative mimesis’ – which has not received sufficient attention in the study of language use, and which is worth exploring if one wants to understand why in certain ritual contexts language users play ‘roles’. Simply put, the concept of ‘performative mimesis’ refers to contrived interactional performance whereby the performer sustains mimicking a predated interactional schema, just like an actor in a theatre manages a performance on stage by enacting a role. Performative mimesis is a particularly interesting phenomenon to consider because the participants of a ritual which necessitates such mimetic behaviour follow often invisible and uncodified scripts. Chapter 5 includes a case study which describes performative mimesis in Chinese university military training courses, representing an understudied ritual drawn from the realm of higher education in China.