Authors:
- Yachun Ge: -

- Haonan Li: -

Abstract: »How does academic discourse negotiate epistemic authority over a contested historical event across decades? Drawing on a 589-article corpus of English-language peer-reviewed scholarship on the Nanjing Massacre (1937ñ1938), published between 1938 and 2024 in eight leading history and Asian-studies journals, and analysed through a triangulation of Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak and Meyer 2016) and corpus-assisted discourse studies (Partington et al. 2013), this article maps three interacting evaluative layers across four historically salient sub-periods (1938-1948; 1949-1971; 1972-1999; 2000-2024): the competition among four dominant naming terms, four syntactic construals of perpetrator agency, and the reweighting of ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION. The study tests three hypotheses: that the dominant naming term shifts from emotive wartime labels to the institutionalised ìNanjing Massacreî only after 1999 (χ²(9) = 284.6, p < .001, Cramerís V = .36); that agent-deleted passives peak in 1949-1971 and give way to individuated agentive clauses by 2000-2024; and that ATTITUDE re-weights from an Affect-dominant early profile to a Judgement-dominant post-1972 profile, with heteroglossic expansion overtaking contraction after 1999 (G² = 96.4, df = 6, p < .001). The three hypotheses are supported. The co-variation of the three layers tracks the transnational politics of historical memory and supplies the grammatical sediment of what is elsewhere called the ìmemory boomî. Extending Appraisal theory along a diachronic axis, the article argues that the scholarly register is not a neutral archive but an arena in which authority over the past is continually reconstituted.« (Source: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications)

Contents:

	Abstract (p. 1)
	Introduction (p. 2)
	Evaluation, memory and the academic register (p. 6)
		Appraisal theory and its diachronic extension (p. 6)
		Critical discourse analysis on historical memory (p. 8)
		Corpus-assisted critical discourse studies (p. 10)
	Data and method (p. 12)
		The 589-article corpus (p. 13)
		Annotation workflow (p. 15)
	Findings (p. 18)
		The long contest over naming (p. 18)
		Syntactic agency: from agent-deletion to re-agentivisation (p. 22)
		ATTITUDE across the four sub-periods (p. 26)
		ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION: the heteroglossic turn (p. 29)
	Discussion (p. 32)
		From affect to polyphony: a historiography of the evaluative sentence (p. 32)
		Geopolitics and the evaluative repertoire (p. 32)
		Moral assertion and dialogic saturation (p. 34)
		Theoretical contribution to appraisal studies (p. 35)
		A comparison with the Japanese-language record (p. 36)
		Silences and institutional conditions (p. 36)
	Conclusion (p. 37)
	References (p. 40)
	Appendix A. Appraisal coding scheme (abridged) (p. 45)
	Ethical Approval (p. 45)
	Informed Consent (p. 45)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of China / History of the Republic of China | History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | Sex and the law: Rape / Wartime sexual violence | War: Second Sino-Japanese War / Nanjing Massacre