A pragmatics of links

This paper applies the linguistic theory of relevance to the study of the way links work, insisting on the lyrical quality of the link-interpreting activity. It is argued that such a pragmatic approach can help us understand hypertext readersbehavior, and thus be useful for authors and tool- builders alike. 1 rather than a narrative form. It proposed the "close examination of explicit links" as the starting point for a study of hyperfiction rhetoric. This claim was based on a comparison of links and poetry, the conclusion being that "the ability of hyperfiction to combine mental jumps with physical ones conveys a new poetical dimension that should be studied in relation to choice as another way of exploring context". Not very sure of how to look at these movements of meaning, I suggested examining the relationship between links and the classical figures of speech. Curiously enough, this is exactly what Wendy Morgan did about the same time in her paper for the Writers Workshop HT´99: "Heterotopics, towards a grammar of hyperlinks" (22) She offered two possible categories of links based on two different linguistic approaches. The first (called "Conjunctive functionality") was that of systemic functional grammar, accounting for links "in terms of their cohesiveness", an ultimately unsatisfactory choice unable to accommodate the linguistic "incoherence" of hypertext.

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