Martin & Rose (2007: 158-9):
The minor players aren’t mentioned again in the story; but Helena’s first and second loves are. Her first love is tracked as follows:
As an eighteen-year-old, I met a young man in his twenties.
He was working in a top security structure.
It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
We even spoke about marriage,
A bubbly, vivacious man who beamed out wild energy.
Sharply intelligent.
Even if he was an Englishman
he was popular with all the 'Boer' Afrikaners.
And all my girlfriends envied me.
Then one day he said he was going on a 'trip'.
'We won't see each other again... maybe never ever again.'
I was torn to pieces.
So was he.
An extremely short marriage to someone else failed all because 1 married to forget.
More than a year ago, I met my first love again through a good friend.
I was to learn for the first time that he had been operating overseas
and that he was going to ask for amnesty.
I can't explain the pain and bitterness in me
when I saw what was left of that beautiful, big, strong person.
He had only one desire - that the truth must come out.
Once he is introduced as a young man, the main strategy for tracking his identity is with pronouns, which refer to him ten times on his own (he and his), and twice together with Helena (we). He’s also identified twice as a kind of person: my first love, and that beautiful big, strong person.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, it is the listener/reader — or discourse analyst — that has to keep track of an identity through a text, not the speaker/writer, since the speaker/writer already knows who they are talking about. That is, the notion of tracking participants misrepresents a listener/reader strategy for the meaning potential of the speaker/writer.
[2] To be clear, in terms of SFL Theory, this confuses two distinct types of cohesion: reference (that) and lexical cohesion (love, person).
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