“Weaving voices: a study of article openings in historical discourse”

The study looks at forms of reported discourse in the openings of historical research articles and shows that there is a strong tendency to make intensive use of both direct and indirect discourse in forms where a plurality of voices are woven into a complex dialogic pattern. The opening may indeed identify a research space within a disciplinary debate, but the creation of a research space is often realized by dramatizing a position (or a variety of positions) and gradually building a complex of voices that indirectly help establish the writer’s voice. Patterns of identification are shown to contribute to the creation of the writer’s dominant position. This position is more often built on the representation of the phenomenic object of investigation than on contextualizing his/her own argument in an epistemic debate. This is related to the narrative dimension of history and to the “quotation fever” of historians in connection with the changing role of quotation in historiography. What seems to characterize the corpus of historical openings is largely the fact that – rather than placing the article in the context of a debate within the discourse community – they seem to make intensive use of reported discourse in forms of dramatization of the voices of sources. This may be explained by the role played by verbal sources and narrative structures in historical discourse (and particularly in some approaches to historical discourse).