Hypertext And Deixis

Hypertext linking is akin to deixis in that each points out of the discourse to the context in which the discourse occurs. The context of a hypertext document such as a World Wide Web page is the World Wide Web itself. This study investigates some linguistic aspects of hypertext, using as data Web pages from college students and commercial enterprises. I first look at the syntactic forms of hypertext anchors, finding them mostly noun phrases. Next, noting the intuitive similarities between hypertext and place deictics, I attempt to find a quantitative relationship between the two. I show that certain place deictics do occur more frequently inside of hypertext anchors than in the ordinary text of Web pages, but this is due to the popularity of the deictic here, as in click here . Observing that hypertext style guides prescribe against the usage of click here , I hypothesize that more experienced hypertext authors will disprefer this usage. Using the assumption that college students are less experienced than commercial Web authors, I am unable to confirm this hypothesis statistically. Finally, I examine the various types of deixis Web authors use in hypertext anch ors, finding the majority to be person deictics. I close by noting that the variety and creativity of deixis within hypertext anchors suggests that the relatively new medium of hypertext is a fully productive genre of natural language.