Reference and Anaphora

The primary function of anaphora in natural language communication, it may be assumed, is to aid the synthesis by the addressee of a model of a particular universe of discourse, as the discourse itself proceeds (cf., e.g., Webber, 1979, Marslen-Wilson, Levy & Tyler, 1982, Fox, 1985 ¹ ). It serves in this respect an essentially signalling or sign-posting function in indicating, for example, the maintenance of reference to an earlier-established discourse referent for the duration of the current utterance segment, or the inference of a latent discourse referent via an existing one, or the degree of saliency which a discourse referent is taken as assuming within the current utterance segment, or the imposition by_ the speaker of a different referential perspective upon an existing discourse referent. The particular nature of the anaphoric relation selected will further indicate, within its discourse context, whether the segment containing the anaphor is extending -the current 'context space' (cf. Reichman, 1978), or 'episode' (cf. Van Dijk, 1982) - i.e. a locally defined, functional unit of discourse -, or reinstating an earlier 'domain of reference' (as I prefer to call Reichman's 'context space', and Van Dijk's 'episode'), or defining a new one. Furthermore, as we have seen,anaphora of all kinds (whether 'strict' or 'discourse', nominal or predicate) does not simply involve a relation between two expressions (the anaphor and the 'antecedent'), or between an expression and a mentally located entity (the anaphor and a discourse referent), but is an interpretative connexion established between the wider utterance segments containing the antecedent-trigger and the anaphor. Indeed, as Marslen-Wilson, Levy & Tyler (1982: 367) suggest, "...in utterances containing anaphoric pronouns, the entire utterance is functioning as the referential device". As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, it is the verb or other predicate of which the anaphor is an argument or a 'modifier' within the anaphoric clause, together with the latter's 'referential' features (e.g. tense, aspect, modality and voice), which primarily determines its potential anaphoric reference, and hence its full contextual interpretation. What is predicated in context of the anaphor becomes especially crucial, of course, in instances where there is no available antecedent-trigger in the surrounding text (the case of so-called 'pragmatically controlled anaphora', or 'exophora'), or where contextual factors rule out the selection of a co-occurring candidate antecedent-trigger (cf,, for example, 4(13)-20)). The significance of what is predicated in context of the anaphor was highlighted most recently in the present work by the examples of French predicate anaphora in 4.2.2.2.1, namely 4(63)-(67), as well as the discussion of them on pages 128-129.