In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. In general, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pronoun or some kind of deictic.
The strict definition of anaphora includes only references to preceding utterances. Under this definition, forward references are instead named cataphora, and both effects together are endophora. Also, the term exophora names situations where the referent does not appear in the utterances of the speaker, but instead in the real world.
Some linguists prefer to define anaphora generically to include all of these referential effects.
Examples
The monkey took the banana and ate it. "It" is anaphora under the strict definition (it refers to the banana).
Pam went home because she felt sick. "She" is anaphora (it refers to Pam)
What is this?. "This" can be considered exophora (it refers to some object near the speaker).
Lesley Stirling's undergraduate training in linguistics, semiotics and French at the University of Queensland was followed by postgraduate coursework in cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh.
Lesley taught at the University of Edinburgh for three years, and simultaneously completed her PhD thesis with a typological and formal account of switch-reference and logophoricity in languages of Papua and North America: she was awarded the Crawford Medal in 1996 by the Australian Academy of the Humanities for this research.
Anaphora, deixis, and referential choice has been another on-going research interest, and she contributed a monograph-length chapter on anaphora and deixis in English, jointly with Emeritus Professor Rodney Huddleston, to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and continues to work on a survey of major approaches to anaphora within linguistics and cognitive science.
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