POTENCIAL DE RECURSOS DE GRADACIÓN PARA CREAR SIGNIFICADOS VALORATIVOS EN EL DISCURSO ESCRITO DE LA HISTORIA

This article presents an exploration of the evaluative potential of graduation resources in Chilean written Spanish in the field of history. In particular, this work analyses the interpersonal meanings of the subsystem of GRADATION , FORCE and FOCUS , which operate in the discursive semantic stratum of language, as part of the APPRAISAL system, within the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistic theory. These resources work by accumulation in texts and contribute to the construction of evaluative prosodies. The main findings can be summarized as: i ) predominance of graduations of FORCE by quantification or intensification over graduations of FOCUS ; ii ) evident privilege of the meanings of FORCE as [scope: time]; iii ) acting of graduation on inscribed and invoked evaluative instances; and iv ) functioning of graduation within nominalizations or ideational grammatical metaphors.