ABSTRACT
Commemoration is a multimodal semiotic practice and an important political activity that serves the formation, reproduction and transformation of political identities. This chapter discusses the fundamental characteristics of political commemoration. The commemorative speech forms the basic type of communication that allows for bringing to remembrance a particular reading of the past in the context of a ritualised public event. Commemoration involves various semiotic dimensions beyond the purely verbal dimension. Often, political commemoration is a complex multimodal ceremony and event that includes visuals, music, place arrangements, architecture and processes of collective action or interaction. The chapter describes the salient discursive features of political commemoration from the perspective of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), taking Austrian commemoration as an example. It focuses on the representation of social actors and events, on argumentation referring to commemorated events, on tropes relating to the commemorated past and the representation of historical changes as well as continuities.
