 in linguistics, anaphora  is the use of an expression the interpretation of which depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent or postcedent). in the sentence sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is anaphoric, referring back to sally. the term anaphora denotes the act of referring, whereas the word that actually does the referring is sometimes called an anaphor (or cataphor). usually, an anaphoric expression is a proform or some other kind of deictic expression.tognini-bonelli (2001:70) writes that "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, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together at the level of the sentence; third, anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing in computational linguistics, since the identification of the reference can be difficult; and fourth, anaphora tells some things about how language is understood and processed, which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in cognitive psychology.the four ways just listed in which anaphora is important for linguistics are from mcenery (2000:3). ==nomenclature and examples== the term anaphora is actually used in two ways. in a broad sense, it denotes the act of referring. any time a given expression (e.g. a proform) refers to another contextual entity, anaphora is present. in a second, narrower sense, the term anaphora denotes the act of referring to the left, that is, the anaphor points to its left toward its antecedent (in languages that are written from left to right). in this narrow sense, anaphora stands in contrast to cataphora, which sees the act of referring pointing to the right. a proform is a cataphor when it points to its right toward its postcedent. both effects together are called endophora. in the broad sense, the term anaphora includes all of these referential effects.concerning the term endophora, see bussmann et al. (1998:58f.). examples of anaphora and cataphora (in the narrow sense) are given next. anaphors and cataphors appear in bold, and their antecedents and postcedents are underlined: ::anaphora (endophora) ::a. susan dropped the plate. it shattered loudly. - the pronoun it is an anaphor; it points to the left toward its antecedent the plate. ::b. the music stopped, and that upset everyone. - the demonstrative pronoun that is an anaphor; it points to the left toward its antecedent the music stopped. ::c. fred was angry, and so was i. - the adverb so is an anaphor; it points to the left toward its antecedent angry. ::d. if sam buys
Pragmatics Semantics Semiotics Syntactic_relationships Tasks_of_natural_language_processing