discussedpast

Dis discussedpast is a term used in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to denote a segment of text whose primary function is to discuss past events as a topic of inquiry rather than to recount them as events. As an annotation label, it marks a metadiscursive stance toward the past within a discourse, indicating that the author or speaker is engaging with the past rather than presenting a straightforward narrative.

Origin and terminology: The name combines discuss and past to signal its function. It appears in a small number of annotation schemes and theoretical discussions about how past events are treated in discourse. It is not a standardized grammatical category; rather, it is a meta-level label used alongside tense and aspect in certain research contexts.

Usage and applications: In corpora annotation and NLP, discussedpast helps distinguish passages whose purpose is to analyze or argue about past events from those that aim to recount them. It supports tasks such as discourse analysis, sentiment and stance detection, and argumentation mining by signaling the discourse function rather than time reference. The label is most often applied to clauses or spans where hedging, evaluation, or metatextual commentary accompanies discussion of past events.

Examples: In a scholarly section, The chapter discusses past reforms and their implications for current policy would be labeled as discussedpast, since the primary aim is to analyze rather than to narrate. Similarly, The article discusses past migrations, evaluating explanations, may receive the same annotation in schemes that separate discussion of the past from straightforward narration.

See also: discourse analysis, annotation schema, metadiscourse, narrative tense.