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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
4.descriptive.syntagma

The descriptive syntagma is chronological by default - i.e., it is not achronological. However, these autonomous segments are not understood to narrate story time or story event, but are what in literature would be described as description - those moments where the writing describes the appearance of a room, or a person, for instance. This is understood to 'pause' the narrative (where narrative is understood to be the causal succession of events) while the writing literally describes.

The same occurs in film, and this is where the film shows a series of images to describe a location or event where these shots are understood to be connected temporally - i.e., these are images collected at the same time in the same place and are now shown consecutively. This is to be distinguished from the bracket syntagma as within the bracket syntagma no attempt is made to suggest that the images represent a common time or moment. [day of wrath, outdoors]

An example of this might be shots of the outdoors where the series of images are understood, literally, to describe, rather than suggest a conceptual relation (which is what is needed to interpret the achronological syntagmas). Where the sequence is narrating story event and not only offering description, a narrative syntagma is developed.

Myst largely works in this manner, as does parts of Online Caroline where the reader is able to see objects that exist within the central character's world, as well as parts of that world via a pseudo webcam. Ryman's 253 could also be considered a fiction that relies upon the descriptive syntagm.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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