| Summary: | Commercial websites do not only have to catch the attention of the web surfer, who in the end can also become a potential customer, they are also engaged in the crucial task of guiding the reader through the complex maze of semiotic systems which constitutes a web page. Successful sites are those giving the reader assistance to be able to find the relevant information he or she is seeking. Although we assume that this navigation aid is not exclusively verbal, the aim of thispaper is to analyse some of the linguistic means by which this navigation is assisted and, more particularly, to explore the presence of textual metadiscourse. After giving a definition of the concept of metadiscourse, we explore the insights that can be gained from the field of usability, within the area of Computer-Human Interaction, which will help us to detect more clearly metadiscursive devices present in commercial websites. Then we categorize the different typesof textual metadiscourse and try to find some distinctive features of their presence in digital metadiscourse. Finally, we extend the classification to a group of devices which is restricted to digital discourse, hypertextual links or nodes. In so far as they help readers to navigate through digital documents, links play an outstanding role in commercial websites and can be classified according to the metadiscoursive function they carry out.
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