Abstract:

The objective of the article is to characterize the use of conceptual metaphors in historical writing in Chile between the years 1940 and 1990. Conceptual metaphors are one of the most used resources in contemporary academic writing and allow, on the one hand, the elaboration of historical meaning. in the texts and, on the other hand, the communicability of the text. From a corpus of 48 undergraduate theses from four Chilean universities from the period 1940-1940, two types of metaphors were identified: (i) Visual and point-of-view metaphors, which allow identifying the construction of the “author’s voice” in the texts and (ii) war and biological metaphors, used to conceptualize the different social and political conflicts studied in the theses. Along with identifying the functions that these metaphors fulfill in writing, it is concluded that their use is transversal and relatively constant over time and in different contexts, which tells us of a homogeneous historiographical community, an issue that is modified at the end of the study. 1990s.

Keywords:
Historiographical field; History of historiography. Conceptual metaphors; Professionalization of historiography