On the background of rising Intranet applications the automatic generation of adaptable, context-sensitive hypertexts becomes more and more important [El-Beltagy et al., 2001]. This observation contradicts the literature on hypertext authoring, where Information Retrieval techniques prevail, which disregard any linguistic and context-theoretical underpinning. As a consequence, resulting hypertexts do not manifest those schematic structures, which are constitutive for the emergence of text types and the context-mediated understanding of their instances, i.e. natural language texts. This paper utilizes Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and its context model as a theoretical basis of hypertext authoring. So called Systemic Functional Hypertexts (SFHT) are proposed, which refer to a stratified context layer as the proper source of text linkage. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, hypertexts are reconstructed from a linguistic point of view as a kind of supersign, whose constituents are natural language texts and whose structuring is due to intra- and intertextual coherence relations and their context-sensitive interpretation. Second, the paper prepares a formal notion of SFHTs as a first step towards operationalization of fundamental text linguistic concepts. On this background, SFHTs serve to overcome the theoretical poverty of many approaches to link generation.

hypertext authoring, context modelling, coherence relations, systemic functional linguistics