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1 results

  • 10 - Describing and Taxonomising the Phenomena of a Glorious Past

  • Edited by Jing Hao, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, J. R. Martin, University of Sydney
  • Book:
    The Discourse of History
    Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024, pp 235-270

  • Summary

    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.