Anaphora

Anaphora can be generally defined as “subsequent reference to an entity already introduced in discourse” (Safir 2004a; see Representing Anaphoric Dependencies). The study of anaphora spans various fields of linguistics, from formal syntax and semantics to linguistic typology and pragmatics, and from computational linguistics to language processing and language acquisition. A major divide in this field is that between intrasentential anaphora—more specifically, binding relations—and intersentential, or discourse, anaphora. The former attracted attention in the 1960s and is one of the central topics in generative syntax and semantics, but also in current typological studies. The latter has been studied extensively since the early 1990s within computational linguistics, discourse representation theory, and functional approaches such as centering theory.