Martin & Rose (2007: 88-9):
In other genres, series are an important resource for interpreting things and events. Newspaper stories for example jump around in time, so that readers must be able to recover relations between times in order to construe the sequence of events. The following extract recounts the events surrounding the 2001 rescue of shipwrecked refugees trying to reach Australia by the Norwegian freighter Tampa, and the Australian government’s shameful refusal to help them:
DRIFTING 22km off Christmas Island and with food and supplies running low, Captain Arne Rinnan was last night trying to maintain order on his besieged ship after being turned away by Australia and warned off by Indonesia. The Norwegian captain of the MS Tampa last night told The Daily Telegraph by satellite phone many of the 438 men, women and children on his ship were ill after their 11th day at sea ...
But Prime Minister John Howard said after a cabinet meeting yesterday afternoon that the ship would not be allowed to enter Australian waters ... Hours later, the Indonesian Government responded by saying the boat people - who are believed to be from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Indonesia - could not return to Indonesia.
Capt Rinnan told The Daily Telegraph he had not yet informed the boat people last night that Australia had refused them permission to land at Christmas Island. Asked if he was afraid of violence, he said: ‘Not at the moment, but we were and we will be if they are turned away. They are starting to get frustrated.' ..,
When he picked up the distress call 24 hours earlier, he believed he would be carrying out a rescue operation, delivering the boat people to the nearest Indonesian port. After reaching the stricken 20m wooden vessel, KM Palapa 1, the crew helped the boat people on board. With the strong south-easterly winds which buffet the area at this time of year, it took the Tampa crew three hours to get them all on board ...
Capt Rinnan said the boat people had become distressed when told they might have to return to Indonesia earlier in the day, with some threatening to jump overboard. 'I said we are heading towards Indonesia and they said "No, you must head to Australia".' Capt Rinnan said they were 'just hanging around' late yesterday, waiting for Australian officials to come on board. (Tsavdaridis 2001: 1).
The potential complexity of tracking the events through the story is evident in the following list of times as they appear in the text:
last night
their 11th day at sea
yesterday afternoon
hours later
last night
at the moment
24 hours earlier
three hours
earlier in the day
late yesterday
As these times are out of sequence in such genres, time cycles are an essential lexical resource for recognising a sequence of events.
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, the wordings that Martin & Rose misrepresent as instances of taxonomically related lexical items are actually grammatical functions: temporal circumstances of Extent (three hours) or Location (all the rest). In addition, two of these are only partially identified:
- their 11th day at sea features in the Location after their 11th day at sea
- at the moment features in the Location not at the moment.
In providing the location and extent of processes in time, such circumstances "are an essential grammatical resource for recognising a sequence of events".
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