« Click here if you want to know who I am » : Deixis in personal homepages

Personal Homepages (HPs) belong to an emerging genre. Confronted with a kind of text which is still rather undefined, whose form and content are not fixed and to which they haven't had exposure before, authors of HPs tend to take as their model other personal HPs, thus ultimately participating in the conventionalization of a genre. By examining the system of deictic elements that can be found in personal HPs, I study these emerging patterns and show rules of function and stylistic characteristics of these texts. This ultimately leads to a tentative definition of the genre of personal HPs.