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This essay was originally published (and is freely available) in the Journal of Digital Information, Volume 1, Issue 7, (December 2000), and is reproduced here with permission.
In the context of this essay grammar is understood to be that system of rules, what semiotics describes as langue, that one necessarily ascribes to in a language community. Without this grammar we are condemned to a series of idiolects. To not use grammar (whether a formal gramamr or a colloquial grammar) is to risk intelligibility and comprehension in quite fundamental ways, and it is this that makes a grammar a formal system. Hypertext (and classical cinema) may have commonly accepted styles but these are not grammars in the sense of langue. They do not constitute the possibility of utterance in advance, as is the case in our usual experience of language.
adrian.miles@rmit.edu.au | rmit university hypertext | university of bergen media studies