Peru is a multiethnic society whose postcolonial language regime was marked by the dominance of Spanish as the exclusive language of state bureaucracy up until recently. There are now forty-eight different Indigenous languages recognized by the state. The process of language regime transformation in Peru started with state traditions of monolingualism by defect, followed by incremental change in state recognition of Indigenous languages and the subsequent development of Indigenous language rights as manifested in constitutional and legislative norms. The adoption of a multilingual language regime based on linguistic rights for minorities was not the product of the Indigenous movement´s actions, nor those of ethnic parties. Institutional reforms that were not designed, and were not expected, to advance linguistic rights, allowed some actors the framework to accelerate incremental change.

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 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 work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).

Is modernism the most apt term for the literary efflorescence that took place in the first decades of the twentieth century across a range of regional and cultural contexts? What are the advantages and disadvantages of considering the heterogeneous collective of the Americas together? This essay spotlights significant Latinx writers, texts, and exchanges seldom included in conversations about American modernism, as it discusses the development of Latinx literature and Spanish-language literatures within the geographical bounds of what is now the US. Doing so reveals the crucial contributions of Latinx poets and the role of translation in fueling literary innovation.

The goal of this chapter is to examine the rules that relate syntactic and semantic representations to each other in adverbial (adjoined) clauses. The following types of adverbial clause relations are discussed, using evidence from English, Spanish, Yaqui and other languages: concessive, conditional, reason, temporal, purpose, manner and means. The chapter sheds light on the complexities of adverbial relations between clauses and how such complexities can be captured in Role and Reference Grammar.

Spain is known for having multiple languages that coexist in different geographical regions with varying degrees of political and social recognition. At the same time, Spanish historiography, argues historian García Sanjuán (2012), has been dominated by the nationalist discourse that systematically distorts the past to construct a “Spanish” and an “Andalusian” identity predicated on the exclusion of anything associated with the Arabic language and Islam, all the while the tourism sector commodifies the “exotic” Arabic past. One of the key settings that distorts and reinvents the past are the festivals of moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. Claiming to be true and faithful retellings of history, these festivals invoke a popular memory of the imagined past, while interlacing and mixing events from multiple time periods, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 to the so-called Christian reconquest, presented as an essential battle between Christianity and the Muslim invaders. In this article, I analyze one of the more popular and historically significant of these festivals, celebrated in the outpost village of Carboneras. I show that the festivals of moros y cristianos help engrain the legitimacy of nationalist ideas that seek to generate a specific hegemonic identity grounded in an affirmation of the Roman-Latin-Christian vision of the past. The language utilized in the festivals is purposefully selected to elevate and justify the actions and attitudes of the Christians and to amalgamate the identity of Moriscos, whose families had lived in these lands for centuries with that of moros from across the Mediterranean. The reenactments that skillfully play with, confuse, and obscure several periods in Spain’s history are a theatrical mirror of a real process of linguistic and social exclusion that reaches from the past to the present day.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.