How linguistics can help the historian

Use the science of linguistics to analyse not what is expressed in a historical document but how it is expressed to shed light on historical events.Composers of documents, ancient or modern, may suppress, spin, or downright corrupt the truth but the fact is that the medium in which they are doing this is always some language or other; and this language, whichever tongue it may happen to be and at whatever epoch, gives out all sorts of signals and clues aside from what is actually being expressed propositionally in its words.