Well, this is a real stinker to finish off with, I'm afraid.
For this one we were required to go and find a news article to use as our base material, and then analyse it in terms of the way time is expressed in it. Like with eTMA03, the layout of the article is intrinsic to the content, and to save me from rewriting it in its entirety, I've made a .png image out of my original document which you can view by following the link in Part 2. Also, if you would fancy to read the assignment in its original form (albeit converted from the original .odt document to a .pdf one) you can do so by clicking the lovely icon:
Incidentally, the icons I'm using for these articles are the ones that I use on my own desktop. They are a part of the Dark-Glass icon theme that is freely available (both as in cost and freedom of information) from KDE-Look.org. However, the theme has since been updated (as to be expected in the vibrant and innovative world of open-source software), and I think these very icons are no longer a part of it.
You now have all of my assignments, carefully presented for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy this last one, and that you have enjoyed all seven of them in the series. I leave you with the seventh.
Time in News Stories
Part 1. Please see references for the article's url.
Part 2. Please click here to read the article (opens in a new tab).
Part 3.
Time expressions in the Darrell Hair story:
| Sentence number | Story time | Time expression |
| S1 | 0 | on 23 May |
| S2 | -7 | after he wrongly accused Inzamam-ul-Haq ... in 2006 |
| S3 | -5 | in October 2007 |
| -4 | seven days in to the tribunal | |
| S4 | -2 | before being reinstated ... in March |
| S6 | +1 | until March 2009 |
Time expressions in the Harbhajan Singh story:
| Sentence number | Story time | Time expression |
| S9 | -2 | at the end of Mumbai Indians' match ... on Friday |
| S10 | +1 | at the end of his hearing |
Time expressions in the England and Wales Cricket Board's Annual General Meeting story:
| Sentence number | Story time | Time expression |
| S13 | 0 | today |
| S15 | +4 | before 2010 |
| S16 | +3 | until the end of the 2009 season |
| S17 | +1 | in the county season |
Part 4.
The first difficulty I encountered with mapping out how time is structured in the story in answer to question 2 was the issue of how the sentences of the article ought to be laid out in my table. Allan Bell asserts that 'each news sentence is usually also its own paragraph' (2007, p. 89), but although this is the case for the example in Figure 3.1 (p. 82), it isn't so for Angus Fraser's article in The Independent. In his article, none of the sentences stand on their own, but come in (mainly) pairs to form paragraphs. Because of this, sentences may begin in the middle of a line one sentence (S6) in fact existing entirely in the middle of a line, with the next sentence beginning after it on the same line thus making it difficult to satisfactorily label them in the 'Sentence number' column. To solve the problem I merely edited the original article so that all sentences begin on a new line, with new paragraphs being indicated, as previously, by a preceding blank line.
The second difficulty I encountered was with regard to the story itself. Or, rather, to the fact that there seemed to be three of them, separate and unconnectable. I found that my designated time zero for the first portion of the article (S1 to S7) would be completely irrelevant to the second and final portions (S8-S12 and S13-S18 respectively). With this discrepancy to resolve, I decided that the best solution was to split my analysis into three portions, have three separate time zeros for the three stories, and to structure the time accordingly. In doing this for question 2, it then followed that I did the same for question 3. Another solution may have been simply to keep time zero as the time of the leading event of the leading story, and to structure all of the other events in the article around that such that, for example, the entire middle portion of the article about Harbhajan Singh's hearing would be in negative time, since it all occurred before the date set for the resumption of Darrell Hair's international umpiring career but since the two events, and the third, were so disconnected, I felt that such an analysis would be illogical, and that the solution I had devised was the least undesirable.
The third difficulty I had was judging the level of detail required in my analyses. For example, will it suffice in question 2 to assign only one time for the (arguably) two events in S10; and would it be wiser to divide the events in S16 (England hosting the Twenty20 World Cup and playing Australia in the Ashes) into two separate times? A similar question can be asked of the time expressions in question 3. I suppose I resolved these issues by aiming for high detail, but allowed myself to exercise discretion where I deemed the level of detail to be inappropriate.
Part 5.
In the Darrell Hair story the real time chronology of events correlates with the time structure as represented in the story in some parts, but not in others. It doesn't correlate at all in the first paragraph of the story, where we begin at time zero and are then immediately taken back into the past to explain the incidents leading up to the resumption of Darrell Hair's career at time zero, describing first his accusation of Inzamam-ul-Haq, and then the preceding action of which he was accusing the cricketer. We are going steadily back into the past. In the second paragraph, however, the real time chronology of events correlates precisely with the time structure as represented in the story. The events are told in the order in which they happened, with no diversions and no back-story. The paragraph is bringing us from the past events described in the first paragraph, steadily closer to the time of the leading story. The third paragraph then takes us right back into the past, further than we went in the first (although knowledge outside of this story, which the reader may or may not happen to possess, is needed to be aware of this), to give us some background information about Hair's past and his apparent relationship with Asian cricketers. Finally in sentence six the most futural event of the story is mentioned, and then we are brought back into the ongoing near past with the knowledge provided in sentence seven.
The time structure as represented in the Harbhajan Singh story has a slightly more complicated relationship with the real time chronology of events. Whereas the Darrell Hair story is based primarily in negative time (i.e. the time before the events of its time zero), this story depicts a series of very closely occurring events in and around time zero, weaving from negative time, into positive time, with a short excursion into negative time (for 'the two games he played') and finishing in positive time. Information is reiterated and explained in negative time, and outcomes of the main events are explained, naturally, in positive time.
The simplest time structure to explain is that represented in the third story, where two reverse chronological waves can be identified. The first paragraph begins at time zero, as the others, and with the final words of its second sentence alludes gently back to ongoing events that began in the near past (viz. the Indian Premier League). With the second paragraph we are taken to the furthermost future of the entire article, notions of the year 2010, and then a second, larger, wave brings us back through the years until we are right back to the present with the discussions of those attending the annual general meeting. Overall, this story is much more concerned with the future than the previous stories. Indeed, if the three stories are taken as large blocks, and have noted their tendencies to describe past, present or future events, it can be argued that, contrary to Allan Bell's argument that 'news stories ... are seldom if ever told in chronological order', this article by Angus Fraser is told in chronological order, and does tend to look from the past into the future.
6.Notwithstanding my previous observation, Bell's argument is borne out clearly in this article. As my analysis shows, time does not flow in one direction, from the past, through the present, to the future, but 'cycles through events taking us further back in time' (p. 86), explaining and elucidating those events until the entire story is known. I think this beginning in the present and cycling back in time may possibly be a product of the speed with which the news is expected to be communicated. If, for example, a person was an avid reader of the news, but found themselves with very little time to do so, it could be possible for them to read only the opening sentence of a news story, learn about the most recent events of an ongoing story, and their memories of previous news stories will enable them to understand and put these events into context without their having to read the entire story.
However, although Angus Fraser will no doubt be aware of this continuation of news stories and the notion of a story's life cycle, he subverts the reader's ability to simply read the opening sentence and then put the pieces together, as it were, because the article is not only about one event. If the reader were to do as I suggested, (s)he would inevitably miss out on the events of two entire stories.
One possible way to avoid such an occurrence would be to give a quick list of the contents of the article at the beginning before the first story, but this would mean eating in to the journalist's allotted word count, as well as creating more for the reader to read and repeating, albeit in very slight detail, material that will occur later in the article. Overall, I understand that time is of the essence in news English (the short sentences, incidentally, illustrating this equally as well as the rest), and that deadlines, journalistic competition and the general fast pace of modern life make concision and speed absolutely necessary.
References
Bell, A. (2007) 'Text, time and technology in news English' in Goodman, S., Graddol, D. and Lillis, T. (eds) Redesigning English, London, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University
'Hair to make international comeback at Old Trafford' Nexisฎ UK (must be signed in) http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/nexis/history/recentdocview.do?listId=190075141&lni=4SD0-9N80-TXJ8-30W5&attachmentId=&attachmentType=&sourceId=8200&attachmentNum=&attachmentSMI=&displayType=&savedLocale=en_GB_ukBusiness&projectId=&returnTo=20_T3665615075&publicationDate=&docTitle=Hair+to+make+international+comeb...&start=1&documentType= (Accessed 3 May 2008)
