“In the wake of the Terror: phraseological tools of time setting in the narrative of history”

Adverbial tools of time setting have long attracted the attention of linguists and discourse analysts, but little attention has been paid to the variety of tools employed to designate time periods or phases and their evaluative implications. The notion of chrononyms is well known to historians themselves, often debating around the issue of periodization and the denomination of historical periods or units. Discourse analysts, on the other hand, have not dealt adequately with the language of periodization. And yet it looks like an ideal place for an exploration of the role of phraseology in historical discourse: how do historians construct their representation of historical periods? How do they identify phases in historical development? An empirical study of such nominalizations and of the time adverbials they constitute can help answer these questions.The chapter intends to explore the variety of phraseological tools employed in a corpus of academic journal articles to identify or classify temporal units. Section 2 briefly presents the corpus of articles used for the study and the tools for analysis. Section 3 focuses on the most frequent phraseological sequences found in the corpus, and looks at chrononyms – noun groups identifying periodization - with their evaluative implications and their textual patterns. Section 4 looks more closely at adverbial phraseology, studying in particular the co-text of complex prepositional phrases expressing ‘transitional’ time setting (in the wake of, in the aftermath of, on the eve of). In the conclusions, frequencies and patterns are interpreted in the light of factors characterizing academic discourse and specific disciplinary values.