A linguistic approach to history

To the historian equipped with the proper tools, it is suggested, any text or artefact can figure forth the thought-world and possibly even the world of emotional investment and praxis of its time and place of production. Not that any given text can alone call up the whole world of its origin or that any given set of texts can reveal its world completely. But in principle, it seems to hold that we today possess the tools to probe texts in ways only dimly perceived or, if perceived, not fully utilized by earlier intellectual or other historians. And these tools, it is suggested, are generally linguistic in nature. (White, 1987:187)

The above quotation is taken from the work of a scholar not of linguistics, but of historiography and intellectual history. It is from Hayden White's The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. The potential of a text or artefact to 'figure forth the thought-world... of its time and place of production' (White, 1987:187) is a point of departure that is common to both historians and linguists. White is sympathetic to the ideas of linguistics and discourse analysis, advocating a 'semiological' approach to text as the most productive approach to questions concerned with meaning production and the meaning systems by which the meanings in a text are produced.

'Semiological', in White's sense, means 'the tradition of cultural analysis that builds upon the theory of language as a sign (rather than a word) system, after the manner of Saussure, Jakobsson, and Benveniste' (White, 1987:191). One of the schools of linguistics that has developed out of the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, among others, is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It provides considerable explanatory power for the whole range of linguistic phenomena, from intonation in speech (at the level of phonology) to syndromes of meaning (at the level of semantics) and beyond to the patterns of cultural tendencies. What I have argued in my recent work from my PhD research is that indeed we do have 'the tools to probe texts' to reveal how they 'figure forth the thought-world' of their time and place of production, and that the tools and concepts offered by SFL are ideal for this kind of job.

I'm hoping to post here, over the next little while, some of my thoughts on how linguistic tools can be used in historical enquiry, and particularly the study of media history.

References:

White, H. (1987). The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 185--213. Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.