Discussants/Stakeholders: Susan Herring, Peter Jones

Abstract: This article explores Thematic variation and its relation to self-presentation in the texts of Ph.D. students' personal homepages. Results show that what is realized as Theme often refers to the Ph.D. students and their dissertation work. That they choose to present themselves or their professional activity as a starting point suggests that Ph.D. students use personal homepages to construct a professional self. A detailed analysis of the marked Themes reveals that the majority of them are circumstantial adjuncts or adverbials of time which function as deictic expressions used to build up a background setting, creating a time-line that lends coherence to the texts. These texts can be identified as narrative life-stories with a past, present and future, and they function as a resource for the homepage authors for creating and maintaining identity and self-presentation on the World Wide Web.

Keywords: Keywords: personal homepages, self-presentation, Theme, World Wide Web, identity, narrative

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