‘Antecedentless’ anaphors: deixis, anaphora, or what? Some evidence from English and French

Abstract

Taking a cognitive perspective, and concentrating on instances of exophora (or so-called ‘antecedentless’ anaphora), where by definition there is no co-occurring expression in terms of which a given anaphor might be interpreted (i.e. a potential ‘antecedent’), I aim to show, firstly, that so-called exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; secondly, that it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation being evoked, and not in terms of the physical situation itself, that the anaphor is interpreted; and finally, that exophora is in reality a more central manifestation of anaphora than the ‘endophoric’ type, where the ‘antecedent’ expression co-occurs with the anaphor. I will base the discussion on naturally occurring data from French and English, and will consider the contributions of gender- and number-marking within pronominal anaphors, as well as of such features of the anaphoric segment as the argument and referent-order statuses assigned to an anaphor by the governing predicator and its modifiers, and the stress and pitch characteristics of the anaphor. All these features play an important role in the assignment of a full interpretation to so-called ‘endophoric’ anaphors just as much as ‘exophoric’ ones, thereby weakening the theoretical basis for the distinction between the two types.

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