Competence versus performance. Intertextuality Idea of the text, written discourse, as signifying chain. New texts interweave prior texts. All discourse is an intertextual weave, new expression encorporating prior expression. Every text presupposes, as the ground of its possibility and intelligibility per se, a larger network of texts and cultural expressions.
Any text is a mosaic of prior texts, quotations that have lost their sources.
Hypertext webs can be used to map intertextuality like no other form of technology or representation. The chain of signifying, signs interpreted in, and only in, other signs. A commentary on a text will always take the form of another text. New writing supplements prior writing in a chain or expanding network. Hypermedia simply extends the notion of the text in hypertext by including visual information, sound, animation, and other forms of data.