The last 15 years has seen an explosion of research on the topic of anaphora. Studies of anaphora have been important to our understanding of cognitive processes, the relationships between social interaction and grammar, and of directionality in diachronic change. The contributions to this volume represent the “next generation” of studies in anaphora — defined broadly as those morpho-syntactic forms available to speakers for formulating reference — taking as their starting point the foundation of research done in the 1980s. These studies examine in detail, and with a richness of methods and theories, what patterns of anaphoric usage can reveal to us about cognition, social interaction, and language change.

In this work, Ken Safir develops a comprehensive theory on the role of anaphora in syntax. First, he contends that the complementary distribution of forms that support the anaphoric readings is not accidental, contrary to most current thinking, but rather should be derived from a principle, one that he proposes in the form of an algorithm. Secondly, he maintains that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint. Lastly, he proposes that there are no parameters of anaphora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from a restricted set of lexical properties. This comprehensive consideration of anaphora redirects current thinking on the subject.

This volume contains a careful selection of papers concerned with actual research questions on anaphoric reference, a subject of current interest with various linguistic subdisciplines. This is reflected in this book as it methodically covers broadly invested approaches from cognitive, neurolinguistic, formal and computational perspectives, each contribution representing the respective 'state of the art' on a high theoretical and empirical level. The volume contains three thematic parts: Anaphors in Cognitive, Text- and Discourse Linguistics; The Syntax and Semantics of Anaphors; and Neurolinguistic Studies on the reception of anaphoric reference. The contributions investigate several Indo-European languages.

Intuitively, it is clear why languages have anaphoric relations: anaphora reduces redundancy, thereby shortening (and hence simplifying) sentences. In order for this simplification to be possible, however, it is necessary that the speaker of a language be able to identify correctly the elements participating in an anaphoric relation and to determine correctly the meaning of the anaphor on the basis of meaning of the antecedent. If a grammar is to reflect the linguistic competence of a native speaker of a language, it must include mechanisms of associating anaphor and antecedent. In this volume the following questions will be considered: What sorts of mechanisms are best suited for representing anaphora in a grammar? What are the conditions on the rule(s) associating anaphors with antecedents? Do the various cases of anaphora form a linguistically significant class of phenomena, and, if so, how can the grammar capture this fact? And what do these answers entail for linguistic theory?

Barbara Fox's thoughtful study examines the use of anaphora in both written and spoken discourse. Any treatment of anaphora must consider the hierarchical of its source texts-type. Texts may be produced and heard or read linearly, but they are designed and understood hierarchically. Discourse Structure and Anaphora goes beyond the information processing concerns of cognitive science to assess the critical role played in all text-types by social, interactional and affective factors. It also considers the fact that texts are organised by socially accepted conventions. Using conversation analysis and rhetorical structure analysis, this book looks at the distribution of pronouns and full noun phrases in three different genres of English, taking data from naturally occurring face-to-face and telephone conversations, small newspaper and magazine articles and a psychoanalytic biography.

This book covers anaphora resolution for the English language from a linguistic and computational point of view. First, a definition of anaphors that applies to linguistics as well as information technology is given. On this foundation, all types of anaphors and their characteristics for English are outlined. To examine how frequent each type of anaphor is, a corpus of different hypertexts has been established and analysed with regard to anaphors. The most frequent type are non-finite clause anaphors - a type which has never been investigated so far. Therefore, the potential of non-finite clause anaphors are further explored with respect to anaphora resolution. After presenting the fundamentals of computational anaphora resolution and its application in text retrieval, rules for resolving non-finite clause anaphors are established. Therefore, this book shows that a truly interdisciplinary approach can achieve results which would not have been possible otherwise.