ABSTRACT
When questions arise about language in history, we tend to think of the past or of how language evolves over long spans of time. To "make history" is to do something that will later be factual, that will have consequences. A "historic event" is one that seems to stand out from its own past and will alter the course of subsequent events. To "do," "write," or "study" history is commonly understood as the reconstruction or recounting of history in the first sense. This ambiguity in the noun "history" is different from what we find in nouns such as "language", "culture", "society", and "politics”. The telling of history is filtered through the genres in which it occurs. Like writing, reported speech, and other metalinguistic operations, it is a form of objectification. It relies on the metalinguistic capacity of human discourse and takes place in a present context whose own contours inevitably shape the result.
