Abstract

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.