Historical past as a textual reality: a linguistic approach in the historical narrative and its methodological implementation

The article examines the linguistic turn and its impact on the relationship between language and history which began to be significant in the humanities in the early 20th century. The linguistic turn has challenged the traditional tenets of historical objectivity which assume that there is a real past which can be described as it actually happened. Instead, proponents of the linguistic turn (H. White, G. Iggers, R. Barthes, F. Ankersmit, J. Derrida) argue that the past does not exist outside our textual representations of it. Textual representations cannot be separated from the ideological and axiological values of historians - text authors. These are profound changes in the ideas about the nature of history and historiography. The paper focuses on a contemporary interdisciplinary approach in historiography moving away from postmodernism and deconstructivism in historical narrative towards balanced approaches that give greater attention to socio-cultural factors in the interpretation of the past. The key presumption is that history is a mode of knowing the reality due to the objective facts and its active anthropocentred interpretation. Historical representations are not static, they reflect pluralities of meanings. They are flexible and more than prone to distortion when values come into play. A clash of different political perspectives is a clash of different historical descriptions. And in this clash a power-wielding social agent has the power to reinterpret the history that will fit their political narrative with other interpretations outlawed and rendered unhistorical. The aim of the research is to look into specific linguistic principles of analyzing "the verbalized past". Thus, the study of the historical narrative should be historiographical as well as linguistic. It is a new approach in a complex multidisciplinary study revealing the true nature of the historical knowledge as a scientific one. Linguistic interpretation of the verbalized past based on pragmalinguistic analysis and discourse analysis reveals ideological interests in rhetorical constructions in a historical description. Texts reflecting the discourse practice of state leaders in the geopolitical situation in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh were looked into. Methods used: linguo-pragmatic text analysis, cognitive discourse analysis. Findings and Results: it was found that the political narrative can substitute the historical description of the reality. The linguistic strategies and means act as a tool of reconstruction and reinterpreta-tion of the past in political perspectives.

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