Hyper-Text-Linguistik

This doctoral thesis suggests a text-linguistic approach dealing
with linked electronic texts, so called HYPERTEXTS. After
explaining the concept and philosophy of the hypertext-idea and
elaborating on a pragmatic definition of WWW-hypertexts (Part A of
the thesis), a linguistic framework, the Textlinguistisches
Analysemodell für Hypertexte (TAH), is proposed (Part B). TAH
provides a pragmatic-functional, top-down model to analyze CONTEXT,
FUNCTION and STRUCTURE of complete hypertexts and the
hypertext-components NODE and LINK. Main aim of TAH is to strictly
separate the different aspects of each hypertext- and linguistic
level – without isolating them. The theoretical approach of TAH is
used for a case study (Part C). Therefore a corpus of
WWW-hypertexts, mainly informative and instructive ones, is
examined with TAH-methods. Aim of this study is on the one hand to
provide some sort of evidence for the plausibility of TAH and is on
the other hand linked with a specific question of research: It
deals with possibilities provided by linguistics to enhance
hypertext-links with logically, semantically and/or rhetorically
typed information. The conclusion of the study is to distinguish
exactly between semantics of a
deepstructure-knowledge-presentation, semantic and rhetoric
relations of the surface, i.e. the hypertext the user can see, and
the layout or traversal behavior respectively of the user
interface, i.e. the browsersoftware. Part C mainly deals with
problems of typed links on the surface of hypertexts.