This chapter explores how written Spanish is used to construe causality in history discourse. It particularly examines the realisation of sequences in a Chilean secondary school textbook, when dealing with the implementation of neoliberalism in Chile. The study shows that the official teaching material draws heavily on logical metaphors to construe sequences. Owing to its focus on discourse semantics, this work offers clear criteria for identifying different types of logical metaphors, beyond the isolated causal lexis that might be found in a text. Based on different combinations of figures and connexions, realisations of sequence are scaled from the most congruent to the least congruent. Thus, the chapter delves into the lexicogrammatical particularities of written Spanish to metaphorically realise connexions. In addition, it reveals that logical metaphors interact with other discourse semantic systems and, therefore, make an enlarged meaning potential available for writers in history texts.

This chapter adopts an extended SFL perspective on pedagogic discourse, in dialogue with Bernstein’s work on regulative and instructional discourse and Maton’s work on autonomy codes. The model proposed establishes a framework for analysing shifts to and from disciplinary knowledge and values as curriculum genres unfold. Examples are taken from secondary school classroom discourse, a history lesson on castles in particular. Resources for scaffolding these shifts are reviewed, including internal connexion, semiotic entities, text reference, periodicity, linguistic services, and ‘internal’ attitude. The model is intended as a practical framework for designing and monitoring the role of disciplinary and extra-disciplinary knowledge and values in pedagogic discourse and as a theoretical framework for interpreting the accommodation of unity and difference in coherent text.

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’.

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.