J.R. Martin and Ruth Wodak: RE/READING THE PAST: CRITICAL AND FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON TIME AND VALUE

The last fifteen years has seen a proliferation of studies and the emergence of a promising field of research in what could be called disciplinary discourse studies or the study of discourse and disciplinarity, using a range of more or less linguistic theoretical tools (register analysis, genre analysis, various varieties of discourse analysis, socio-cultural theory, social semiotics, and, more recently, multimodality). Such studies have engaged with the discursive construction of knowledge in a range of disciplines. As the editors of this collection rightly point out, however, there has been a tendency to emphasize the discourse of science in this emergent field of inquiry, so it is a welcome sight to see attention being directed to a humanities discipline such as history. There have, of course, been exceptions to this trend and one thinks here of some of the work of Bazerman (e.g. Bazerman 1981) and Swales's engaging textography of his Michigan workplace (Swales 1998), as well as Lee's study of the gendered construction of school geography using a post-structuralist discourse analytic approach (Lee 1996). All of this work has of course been influential and formative in work on academic literacies, language for specific purposes, language for academic purposes, and language across the curriculum. In the introduction, Martin and Wodak make a convincing case for the theoretical complementarity of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) and indeed the two theoretical traditions are intertwined in ways that call out for a historical investigation in its own right a ` la Hymes and Fought's classic treatment of American Structuralism (Hymes and Fought 1981). Typically, SFL has been the grammatical theory of choice in CDA and the grammatical metalanguage employed is more often than not derived from it. The innovations of CDA have been in the area of linking language to the broader social context, analysing pervasive power structuring in language, the theorizing of language as social practice, and a broadening of the scope of the term discourse: CDA sees discourse in fact as a form of social practice. From a classic SFL point of view, this might be seen at times as done at the expense of a comprehensive and rigorous grammatical analysis. However, in any mapping of the current state of linguistic analysis these theoretical perspectives must be positioned closely together. Despite the promise of theoretical complementarity in the introduction, individual contributions to the collection tend to take one or …