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Penetrating Historical Discourse's Truth Matrix: A Corpus Analysis of Oral History Testimonies

Fitzgerald, Christopher 2020. Penetrating Historical Discourse's Truth Matrix: A Corpus Analysis of Oral History Testimonies. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 3 , pp. 75-95. 10.18573/jcads.47

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Abstract

Historical Discourse’s Truth Matrix was first posited by Michel Foucault to describe the emergence of a discourse of historical events subsequent to the cessation of war and established by the most powerful arbiters of those events. This paper adapts the implements of Foucault’s toolbox to conceptualise the dimensions of subjectivity that historical events pass through from the original event to the subsequent depictions of those events in historical writing or other media. The Corpus of Irish Historical Narratives (COIHN) is a one-million-word representative corpus of oral-history witness testimonies taken from the Bureau of Military History Archive (BMH) which depict the events surrounding the Irish struggle for independence from the lead up to the 1916 rising to the signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921. The archive provides a rich source of both historical, social and cultural data and has been the source of many publications pertaining to events of this pivotal time in Irish history. This study takes a hybrid corpus-driven and corpus-based approach to the analysis of epistemic modality in these statements through hedged expressions using mental process verbs and, in doing so, offers a framework for the analysis of a core dimension of historical discourse’s truth matrix. The notion of ‘paradoxical authority’ is proposed, stating that the authority of a witness is boosted rather than mitigated by expressing weak commitment to the truth of a proposition.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BC Logic
C Auxiliary Sciences of History > CD Diplomatics. Archives. Seals > CD921 Archives
H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher: Cardiff University Press
ISSN: 2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 2 July 2020
Date of Acceptance: 9 September 2019
Last Modified: 03 May 2023 02:36
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/137884

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