Web pages, text types, and linguistic features: Some issues

1 Introduction With the growth of the Web a massive quantity of documents, namely web pages, are freely available for (corpus-)linguistic studies. Web pages can be considered as a new kind of document, much more unpredictable and individualized than paper documents. While the linear organization of most paper documents is still reflected in traditional electronic corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), web pages have a visual organization that allows the inclusion of several functions or several texts with different communicative purposes in a single document. For example, the space on a web page can be divided into different sections, organized by lists of links – mainly isolated noun structures or verbal elements (Haas and Grams 2000: 186–187) – and snippets of text scattered around the main body of the document, such as navigational buttons, menus, ads, and search boxes, that are visually dislocated in different areas of a single page. Additionally, the effect of hyperlinking (Haas and Grams 1998; Crowston and Williams 1999), interactivity and multi-functionality (Shepherd and Watters 1999) can affect the textuality of web pages, which heavily rely also on the use of images and other graphical elements. Although the use of fonts of different types, sizes, and colours, as well as the use of formatting devices, like columns, lines separating different sections of a document, pictures, etc. is not new (cf. Waller 1987 for a detailed description of the role of both language and typography in the formation of document types), a newspaper article organized in columns and headlines does not lose its specific linguistic and textual characteristics when it is included in a corpus like the BNC. The same is not true for many web pages, because the visual structure of a web page incorporating a newspaper article in most cases cannot be flattened out or ignored without losing important information (cf. Ihlström and Lundberg 2003; Ihlström and Åkes-son 2004). A web page can be considered as a sort of container from where the reader picks up the information s/he needs. Artificially separating what is considered to be the main body from the rest is an arbitrary operation and it would