Anaphora (linguistics)

Anaphora (linguistics)

In linguistics, an anaphora ( /əˈnæfərə/) is a type of expression whose reference depends upon another referential element. E.g., in the sentence 'Sally preferred the company of herself', 'herself' is an anaphoric expression in that it is coreferential with the expression in subject position. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic—for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent. 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 linguistics anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing, 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 psychology.