anaphor
- noun
- /əˈnæfər/
- Specialized
:
anáfora
- An anaphor, like she in the phrase "Maria arrived late because she missed the bus," helps avoid repetition.
Examples
-
In the sentence, "John lost his keys, and he couldn't find them," the word he is an anaphor that refers back to John.
-
So it's really just a distinction between anaphors and everything else.
-
This contrasts with the studies of Haigh et al. (2011) and Wood et al. (2016), which focused on processing for an anaphor following a conditional inducement.
Academic text (2018) -
For Monika Fludernik, "mere repetition is very difficult to handle," and "the choice of repeating a lexeme rather than using the pronominal anaphor remains somewhat of a puzzle" (139).
Academic text (2005) -
Using an anaphor, such as it in the sentence "The car is fast, and I love it," reduces redundancy in language.
Surface Forms
Morphology
anaphor = anaphora (opaque) = ana + phor
The relation is a specialist back-formation from 'anaphora' built from Greek combining forms, which is not transparently analyzable by average learners.
Etymology
Anaphor comes from Greek parts ana- meaning 'back' and phor meaning 'carry', so it literally 'carries back' to an earlier word. A helpful way to remember it is that an anaphor, like 'he' or 'she', points back to a name already said, and you can see the same 'phor' idea in metaphor, which 'carries' meaning across.
