Article In: Perspectives in Systemic Functional Linguistics: A celebration of the fiftieth international congress
Edited by Tom Bartlett
[Language, Context and Text 8:1] 2026
Doing multimodal critical discourse analysis in the field of historical memory
How have systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics contributed?
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Abstract
This article addresses the contribution that systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics offer to the field of multimodal critical discourse analysis. Adopting a reconstructive and deconstructive approach to critical discourse analysis, this study illustrates this contribution by analyzing how historical memories of Chilean indigenous peoples are constructed — both through the agency of local community participants and through ideological positionings circulating in more institutional spaces and state policies developed in Chile in recent decades. The analysis shows how the social semiotic perspective and systemic functional linguistic theory have been fundamental to exploring, in a refined and rich way, the processes of historicizing memories and the key role of visual historical testimonies in building diverse views regarding ancestral peoples in Chile. Special attention is paid to interpersonal meanings and the construction of dialogicity when analyzing discourses circulating across different spatial and temporal scales- specifically concerning the Mapuche people. To conduct this analysis, the article focuses on multimodal genres, images as historical testimonies, and the appraisal system -specifically the engagement subsystem- given that it constitutes a productive conceptual and methodological tool for mapping intertextuality and intersubjectivity in texts, aspects that are central to discourse analysis from a critical perspective.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical and methodological approach
- 2.1Critical discourse studies
- 2.1History and historicisation of memory
- 2.3Systemic Functional Linguistics and the discourse-semantic system of appraisal
- 2.4Images as historical testimonies
- 3.Critical multimodal discourse analysis: Historicisation of memories of Mapuche people
- 3.1Taking a reconstructive perspective: Rural and urban Mapuche people ‘from below’
- 3.2Taking a deconstructive perspective: Official and public discourses ‘from above’
- 4.Final remarks
- Notes
- Author queries
References
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