“Writing history: argument, narrative and point of view”

This paper is part of a wider study on cross-disciplinary language variation in the humanities and social sciences. By relying on a 2.5-million-word corpus, the paper explores the specific interplay of narrative and argument in historical discourse, with a view to the implications for the analysis of point of view. First of all, shifting points of view in the language and structure of historical research articles are analysed in a textual pragmatic perspective, by showing the implications of adopting different temporal perspectives and disciplinary positions to look at historical events. Secondly, moving on to an overview of recurrent phraseological elements in the corpus, we carry out a functional analysis of the most frequent element, i.e. the point-of-view shifter at the same time, showing that it opens a descriptive perspective in narrative and a dialogic perspective in argument. The conclusions emphasise the textual and discoursal functions of point-of-view shifters.