Rules of combination

As Metz makes abundantly clear, there is no real paradigmatic axis in the cinema, and this is also so in hypertext - when I write hypertext I can link more or less to anywhere and there are no necessary rules of combination that exclude or promote particular destinations. This suggests that it is within the series of combinations formed by links, what Metz in the cinematic case characterises as autonomous syntagmatic units, that hypertext structure resides.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information