Pronominal Anaphora

The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the notion of pronominal anaphora and to take a closer look at their syntactic behaviour. After a brief definition of the term itself, we will investigate in which contexts they occur. Of course, one question that arises is whether some general patterns can be observed – how do pronominal anaphora generally behave, and do we find exceptions? Moreover, the issue of crosslinguistic variation has to be addressed, and there are also some universal tendencies that can be identified. However, before turning to the syntactic structures in which pronominal anaphora occur and the peculiarities that show up in connection with them, the term itself has to be scrutinized more closely, since both parts of it can be understood in different ways. If we abstract away from recent syntactic theory, the term anaphora is generally used for expressions that receive interpretation by something mentioned before in the discourse, the so-called antecedent.1 Following this definition, an anaphoric expression might be a reflexive, as in (1-a), or a personal pronoun, as in (1-b). In this sense, herself and she in (1) are anaphoric because they both refer to Anna (which is indicated by coindexation); so Anna functions in both examples as antecedent for the anaphoric expressions.