Previous slide | Next slide | Back to first slide |
= As such, functional linguistics needs to rub up against hypertext and see which of our existing tools and concepts prove useful, what we can learn about textuality and meaning in general, and where we may want to extend our theories to help us analyze how verbal meaning works in hypertext;
= I began this inquiry with a simple assumption: that the theories of intertextuality which tell us something about the kinds of relations we make between texts ought to also tell us something about hypertextuality; this has largely proved fruitful, and indeed productive in both directions;
= An old conjecture about intertextuality is that every kind of meaning relation we construe between texts can also be construed "within a text" between textual units on some scale, and this principle of course also serves to undermine our naive notion of what "a text" is -- other than the fact that someone has bound various text-units together in a single material object, what makes them cohere as a meaningful unit?
= We do know a bit about the answer to this question: that there is cohesion at the lexico-grammatical level, provided semantic considerations are included;