In
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
,
anaphora (icon) is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a
pro-formA pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context...
or some other kind of
deicticIn linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...
--for instance, a
pronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
referring to its
antecedentIn grammar, an antecedent is a noun, noun phrase, or clause to which an anaphor refers in a coreference. For example, in the passage "I did not see John because he wasn't there", "John" is the antecedent of the anaphor "he"; together "John" and "he" are called a coreference because they both refer...
. The term
anaphor, an English singular variant, is sometimes used to designate an individual use: "an anaphor is a linguistic entity which indicates a referential tie to some other linguistic entity in the same text."
Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on different levels. First, anaphora indicates "how discourse is constructed and maintained". Second, on the level of the sentence, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together. Third, in
computational linguisticsComputational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
anaphora presents a challenge to
natural language processingNatural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
, since the identification of the reference can be challenging. Fourth, anaphora "tells us some things about how language is understood, and processed", which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
.
Nomenclature and definition
The term anaphora is used in two ways. It can be used in a strict sense, and reserved for references to
preceding utterances (
backward reference), which can be anything, such as a noun (see examples below). In this sense, anaphora is contrasted with cataphora, in which
forward references are used (where the cataphoric expression refers to a succeeding rather than a preceding utterance). Both effects together are called
endophoraIn linguistics, endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to something intratextual, i.e. in the same text.For example, in the sentences "I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach", "she" is an endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the...
. A more generic use of the term anaphora has it include all of these referential effects, a use of the term generally accepted since the "ground-breaking" work of M. Halliday and R. Hasan in
Cohesion in English (Longman, 1976).
Thus, in endophora, reference is made to something inside of the text in which the reference is found.
- In anaphora, as opposed to cataphora, reference is made to something within a text that has been previously identified. For example, in Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly, the word it refers to the phrase the plate.
- In cataphora, reference is made to something within a text that has not yet been identified. For example, in Because he was very cold, David put on his coat the identity of the he is unknown until the individual is also referred to as David.
Two other, related, kinds of reference are noteworthy:
- An exophoric reference
In linguistic pragmatics, exophora is reference to something extralinguistic, i.e. not in the same text, and contrasts with endophora. Exophora can be deictic, in which special words or grammatical markings are used to make reference to something in the context of the utterance or speaker...
refers to language outside of the text in which the reference is found.
- A homophoric reference is a generic phrase that obtains a specific meaning through knowledge of its context. For example, the referent of the phrase the Queen must be determined by the context of the utterance, which would identify the identity of the queen in question.
Examples
- The monkey took the banana and ate it. "It" is anaphoric under the strict definition (it refers to the banana).
- Pam went home because she felt sick. "She" is anaphoric (it refers to Pam).
- What is this? "This" can be considered exophoric (it refers to some object or situation near the speaker).
- The dog ate the bird and it died. "It" is anaphoric and ambiguous (did the dog or bird die?).
Anaphora in generative grammar
In
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, the term
anaphor is used to refer to English's
reflexiveA reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that is preceded by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers within the same clause. In generative grammar, a reflexive pronoun is an anaphor that must be bound by its antecedent...
and
reciprocal pronounThe reciprocal pronouns in English are one another and each other. Together with the reflexive pronouns — myself, yourself, ourselves, yourselves, and others — they are classified as anaphors....
s, and analogous forms in other languages. Anaphors in this sense must have strictly local
antecedentsIn grammar, an antecedent is a noun, noun phrase, or clause to which an anaphor refers in a coreference. For example, in the passage "I did not see John because he wasn't there", "John" is the antecedent of the anaphor "he"; together "John" and "he" are called a coreference because they both refer...
, because they receive their
referenceReference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
via the local syntactic operation (or rule of interpretation) known as
bindingIn linguistics, binding theory is any of a broad class of theories dealing with the distribution of pronominal and anaphoric elements. The idea that there should be a specialised, coherent theory dealing with this particular set of phenomena originated in work in transformational grammar in the 1970s...
.
Reflexive anaphors must obey binding condition A, which states that "a reflexive pronoun must be bound within the smallest category containing it, its selecting head and a subject (=its governing category, or GC)". In the following sentence:
*John thought that she saw himself, the GC of the reflexive 'himself' is the relative clause, since it contains the anaphor itself, its selecting head (saw) and a subject (she). The only available noun that could bind 'himself' is 'she', but this is ruled out because of the gender mismatch. The anaphor is therefore left unbound, which violates condition A - explaining the sentence's un
grammaticalityIn theoretical linguistics, grammaticality is the quality of a linguistic utterance of being grammatically well-formed. An * before a form is a mark that the cited form is ungrammatical....
.
Anaphor resolution
The
resolution of an anaphor means finding what it is referring to. Often, the relation between an anaphor and its antecedent is found via inference:
- We found a house to rent, but the kitchen was very small.
The inference made is that the kitchen is a part of the house discussed in the first clause.
Resolution can be difficult when sentences are taken out of context:
- The Prime Minister of New Zealand visited us yesterday. The visit was the first time she had come to New York since 1998.
If the second sentence is quoted by itself, it is necessary to
resolve the anaphor:
- The visit was the first time the Prime Minister of New Zealand had come to New York since 1998.
Although of course, as
The Prime Minister of New Zealand is an office of state and
she would seem to refer to the person currently occupying that office, it could quite easily be that
the Prime Minister of New Zealand had visited New York since 1998 and before the present day, whilst the present incumbent
she had not.
However, even when taken in context, anaphor resolution can become increasingly complex. Consider the three examples:
- We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were hungry.
- We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were ripe.
- We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were here.
In the first sentence, "they" refers to "monkeys", whereas in the second sentence, "they" refers to "bananas". A semantic understanding that monkeys get hungry, while bananas become ripe is necessary when resolving this ambiguity. Since this type of understanding is still poorly implemented in software, automated anaphora resolution is currently an area of active research within the realm of
natural language processingNatural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
. The third sentence isn't easily resolved either way.
Complement anaphora
In some special cases, an anaphora may refer not to its usual antecedent, but to its
complementIn grammar the term complement is used with different meanings. The primary meaning is a word, phrase or clause that is necessary in a sentence to complete its meaning. We find complements that function as an argument and complements that exist within arguments.Both complements and modifiers add...
set. This phenomenon was first extensively studied in a series of psycholinguistic experiments, in the early 1990s.
In (1), the anaphoric pronoun 'they' refers to the children who are eating the ice-cream. Contrastingly, in (2), 'they' seems to refer to the children who are not eating ice-cream. Only a few of the children ate their ice-cream. They ate the strawberry flavour first. Only a few of the children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead.
The fact that sentences like (2) exist in the language seems at first odd: by definition, an anaphoric pronoun must refer to some noun that has already been introduced into the discourse. In complement anaphora cases, since the referent of the pronoun hasn't been formerly introduced, it is difficult to explain how something can refer to it. In the first sentence of (2), the set of ice-cream-eating-children is introduced into the discourse; but then the pronoun 'they' refers to the set of non-ice-cream-eating-children, a set which hasn't been priorly mentioned. One resolution of this problem is that 'they' refers to all the children, but the second sentence semantically excludes the children who ate ice cream, since children who ate their ice cream cannot throw it around the room.
Several accounts of this phenomenon are found in the literature, based on both semantic and pragmatic considerations. The most important point of debate is the question, whether the pronoun in (2) refers to the complement set (i.e. only to the set of non-ice-cream-eating-children), or to the maximal set (i.e. to all the children, while discounting the minority group). The answer to this question may have theoretical consequences regarding the question of the kind of information that the brain is able to access or calculate, and also pragmatical consequences regarding the way a theory of anaphora resolution should be devised.
See also
- Anaphoric macro
An anaphoric macro is a type of programming macro that deliberately captures some form supplied to the macro which may be referred to by an anaphor...
- Coreference
In linguistics, co-reference occurs when multiple expressions in a sentence or document refer to the same thing; or in linguistic jargon, they have the same "referent."...
- Donkey pronoun
A donkey pronoun is a pronoun that is bound in semantics but not syntax.Some writers prefer the term donkey anaphora, since it is the referential aspects and discourse or syntactic context that are of interest to researchers . The terms d-type or e-type pronoun are also used, mutually exclusively,...
- Generic antecedents
- Named entity recognition
Named-entity recognition is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify atomic elements in text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc.Most research on NER...
- Unsolved problems in linguistics
This article discusses currently unsolved problems in linguistics.Some of the issues below are commonly recognized as unsolved problems; i.e., it is generally agreed that no solution is known...
- Pro-drop language
A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are in some sense pragmatically inferable...
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