We can see the same combination of serial expansion and hierarchy of periodicity operating towards the end of Mandela’s autobiography. As an autobiographical recount, his story moves through time. And so there is a tremendous amount of serial expansion, from one setting in time to the next, and lots of sequential development within each of these. The final chapter of his book, for example, begins with a recount of Inauguration Day, May 10, 1994. Skipping a line in the paragraphing, Mandela then expands on this by reflecting on the unimaginable sacrifices of his people, and his own personal failures at the expense of his family. Then, skipping another line, Mandela moves on serially again to the recount that sums up his life, some of which we’ve already seen.
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[1] To be clear, as previously explained, the authors' discussion of a hierarchy of periodicity has confused textual status (Theme, New) with textual transitions (implicit elaborating conjunction) between textual prominences and what follows (in the case of higher level Themes) and what precedes (in the case of higher level News). The authors' notion of serial expansion then complements these elaborating conjunctive relations with other sub-types of expansion, though without distinguishing those of extension (e.g. additive) from those of enhancement (e.g. temporal).
In terms of SFL Theory, these expansion relations between messages are modelled as cohesive conjunction, a lexicogrammatical resource of the textual metafunction. In terms of the authors' own model, to be theoretically consistent, these conjunctive relations would have been modelled as a discourse semantic resource of the logical metafunction.
[2] To be clear, here Martin & Rose are again inconsistent with their own model. Here they associate summative elaboration with serial expansion, despite having previously associated it with their hierarchy of periodicity: the "distilling" of previous information as a higher level New.
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