From the Metafunctions of Language to the Hyperfunctions. The New Multimodal Reality of Hypertext

Abstract

Every act of communication stems from the existence of two individuals, who, at least, establish a relationship to share a particular type of information. That relationship will result in a communication model that, with the advent of information and communication technology, has undergone a remarkable change, so that the message is no longer linear or sequential to become a set of multiple relationships which affect the sender, recipient and message. Among the many changes that occur in this new communication model, one of which relates to the sociolinguistic springs that run through the relationship between sender and receiver. In this essay, we try to explain how these relationships work from a theoretical point of view, so that we can speculate a sort of model applicable to each enunciation. To do this we will start from the theoretical assumptions proposed by M.A.K. Halliday who, by combining autonomous linguistic sources with sociolinguistics, offered a theory of language known as “systemic functional”, being supported by the study of language as a system and by the functions arising from its use or metafunctions of the language, namely ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. In the telematic space, with the peculiarities that define hypertextual communication, the metafunctions became different from that described for oral and written environments. All of them will be hyperfunctions or multifunctions precisely because of the multimodal essence (text, image and sound) that houses them. We intend to theoretically bring the distances produced from the jump from the analogue environment to the digital environment, to propose a kind of specific theory for this new communicative space.