Failing To Distinguish Continuity From Conjunction

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 282):

Similarly Ah, but marks the resigned counterexpectation of shifting from viewing the image in the present to reconstructing events from the past – the meaning is something like ‘although we've been looking at the picture for a bit, it's time now to begin our tale’:

Ah, but those 35,000 Sydneysiders [[who were lying in those very spots on the afternoon of February 6, 1938]], surely felt equally at peace. |||

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, the Ah and but in this clause serve different functions, as recognised graphologically by the intervening comma that assigns them to different information units. The Ah is a continuative, and its function is to signal a new turn in the discourse. The previous clauses had described a contemporary photograph of Bondi Beach, and the continuative signals the beginning of the historical recount:

And so there they lie, happily sweltering in the summer sun on Australia's most famous beach, just as they have for so many generations past. It is such a wonderfully peaceful scene – of people and nature as a happy whole – that it is simply unimaginable that in a few seconds nature could ever rear up and savage the lot of them.

Ah, but those 35,000 Sydneysiders who were lying in those very spots on the afternoon of February 6, 1938, surely felt equally at peace.

The but, on the other hand, is a conjunction, and its function is to cohesively relate its clause to the previous text in terms of a logical relation of concessive condition ('even so').