Cataphoric Reference

5 Key excerpts on "Cataphoric Reference"

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  eBook - ePub

  Suspense

  Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations

  • Peter Vorderer, Hans Jurgen Wulff, Mike Friedrichsen(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Zeigemoment ), which is always present in cinematic speech, can be identified particularly clearly in them. At the same time, the cataphor is a manifestation of a textual instance, an authority that controls the action in such a way that it points to future developments. If one so wishes, this is a paradox: the advance reference aimed to a still open situative development. It is one of the conventions of storytelling that one only foreshadows things that actually happen, and that actually become a subject of the situation. The following course of events must, therefore, already be known before a cataphor can be installed.

  Let us refer to Bühler (1965) on anaphoric expression as he wrote in general about textual references: "There is a showing in the form of the anaphora; and whoever looks for the field of showing ('Zeigfeld') where it is happening, will find the ribbon of emergent speech itself being treated as a 'Zeigfeld.' The context is the anaphoric 'Zeigfeld,' the emergent speech becomes retrospective and prognostic in places, becomes reflexive " (p. 258). In two respects, this concept is important and puts in a nutshell the juxtaposition of a work's structure and the activity of reception that is so difficult to convey:

  1. The staging of this field of reference, and thus of the movement of reception, is absolutely essential for the dramaturgy of suspense.
  2. The experience of suspense follows a strategy of referential showing and is thus always orientated to the text. Viewers cannot free themselves completely from the text—despite the importance that the workings of the imagination have for the experience of suspense. In fact, the viewers are always being led back into that domain of controlled information.

  Narrative, Thematic, and Atmospheric Frameworks

  Every narratively eventful storyline opens up a series of possible connections that each person who has mastered the laws of the genre or the rules of everyday life can calculate. Someone, for example, who steals some money, commits an offense, is sought after by the police (and possibly others). Another person, who finds some incriminating material that can send the highest echelons of a crime syndicate to prison, must be conscious of the fact that there will be an attempt to get the material back at any price. One can dispense with further examples here—it is clear that the way someone gets caught up in a story is almost identical to the way that one gets further into a field of complications, antagonisms, and the like. When the story gets going, the further developments can be extrapolated, at least in part, from what has already happened.

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  Cohesion in English

  • M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  programme by ellipsis.

  2.3.5 Cataphoric Reference

  So far no mention has been made of cataphoric personal reference. Personals can refer cataphorically, as in

  [2:26] He who hesitates is lost.

  where he does not presuppose any referent in the preceding text but simply refers forward to who hesitates. Unlike demonstratives, however, which do refer cataphorically in a way that is genuinely cohesive – they refer FORWARD to succeeding elements to which they are in no way structurally related (see 2.4 below) – personals are normally cataphoric only within a structural framework, and therefore do not contribute to the cohesion of the text. The reference is within the sentence, and is determined by the structure of the sentence.

  It may be helpful nevertheless to summarize the cataphoric structural functions of the personal forms – in which only the personal pronouns participate, never the possessive forms. (i) Third person pronouns other than it may refer cataphorically to a defining relative clause, as in [2:26]. This usage is felt to be somewhat archaic; it is found in proverbs and aphorisms, and in some rhetorical, literary and liturgical styles. Such Cataphoric Reference is also found occasionally with we and you, as in you who doubt my word (meaning ‘those among you who doubt my word’; note that there is no cataphora in forms which are non-defining, such as you, who used to be so tolerant). (ii) All third person pronouns occur cataphorically as ‘substitute themes’ in clauses in which their referent is delayed to the end, eg: they’re good these peaches. (iii) As a special case of the last, it is very frequently used in this way where the subject of the clause is a nominalization, as in it’s true that he works very hard. This is in fact the unmarked or typical form in such cases; the alternative, that he works very hard is true

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  Pragmatics and the English Language

  • Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  it is co-referential, that is, each refers to the same entity. Except that they do not quite. The animal that is killed is not identical to the animal that is cooked and is eventually eaten. But of course, the point of this title is to make it clear that we are anaesthetised to the realities of eating meat by the fact that we only encounter “it” as prepared food in supermarkets.

  Reflection: Anaphoric and other referring expressions – their variation across English written registers

  Biber et al. (1998: chapter 5) explore the usage of referring expressions, particularly anaphoric expressions, across different registers, using the corpus-based methodology (see also Biber et al. 1999: 237–240, for similar findings). More specifically, they examine referring expressions (noun phrases and pronouns) across two spoken registers, conversation and public speeches (though we will not report the results of public speeches here) from the London-Lund corpus, and two written registers, news reportage and academic prose, from the LOB corpus. They found an uneven distribution of referring expressions. News reportage had the largest number (63 per 200 words), then conversation (61) and finally academic prose (51). To understand these differences better Biber et al. then looked at the distribution according to type of referring expression, retrieving frequencies across the registers for exophoric pronouns, anaphoric pronouns and anaphoric nouns. They discovered that exophoric referring expressions made up over half of the referring expressions in conversation, whereas they were almost non-existent in the written registers, news and academic prose. Those written registers were dominated by anaphoric nouns. In other words, people, not surprisingly, regularly refer to aspects of their immediate extralinguistic context in conversation, whereas in the written registers they refer to aspects of the (previous) text.

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  Introduction to Psycholinguistics

  Understanding Language Science

  • Matthew J. Traxler(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  One major characteristic of referents that facilitates anaphoric reference is focus. Focus is defined in very specific ways in theories such as Sanford and Garrod’s scenario mapping and focus framework, and Grosz and colleagues’ centering theory (see below), but, roughly speaking, you can think of the focus of a discourse as being the topic (what the discourse is about), the most important, and/or the most salient element in the discourse at a specific moment in time. (Focus shifts over time as new concepts are introduced and as different aspects of previously introduced concepts are highlighted.) All other things being equal, it is easier to establish co-reference with a focused antecedent than a non-focused antecedent. Further, focus is a matter of degree rather than an either/or proposition. The focused element can stand out only a little bit from other, non-focused elements of the discourse, or the focused element can be really super-focused and be very distinct from other elements of the discourse. Language offers a number of ways to heighten the focus on a particular referent. For example, syntactic position can affect the degree of focus. Syntactic subjects, such as Steve in sentence (1) are more focused than words in other syntactic positions, such as direct objects (e.g., a gift in (1)) or prepositional objects (e.g., his birthday in (1)) (Gordon & Hendrick, 1997; Gordon & Scearce, 1995). As a result, listeners have less difficulty resolving an anaphor that refers back to a syntactic subject (with the exceptions noted below) than an anaphor that refers back to words in non-syntactic-subject positions. There are some cases, however, where unusual syntactic structure and unusual word orders can make a given element even more focused than it would be if it appeared in subject position in a common subject–verb–object sentence

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  Introduction to Pragmatics

  • Betty J. Birner(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  cataphoric reference. While an anaphoric expression co-refers with a fuller expression earlier in the discourse, as in the three examples in (130), a cataphoric expression co-refers with a fuller expression later in the discourse, as in the examples in (131):

  (131)

  a.  Every Sunday, as soon as they were free, the two little soldiers would set out walking. (de Maupassant 1970) b.  Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were bursting with pride. It was a great responsibility taking care of so many ducklings, and it kept them very busy. (McCloskey 1941) c.  As if she knew she were the topic of conversation, Blossom turned her head and looked at him. (Herriot 1972)

  The example in (131a) is the first sentence of a short story; here, they is co-referential with the later NP the two little soldiers. In (131b), the pronoun it is coreferential with taking care of so many ducklings. Although it may seem odd to think of a phrase like taking care of so many ducklings as taking a referent, the fact that it supports both cataphoric and anaphoric pronominal coreference (note the anaphoric reference in it kept them very busy ) indicates that this phrase indeed represents a discourse entity, a conclusion similarly supported by the fact that the author can posit a property of this entity (i.e., that it kept the Mallards very busy).

  Finally, the two instances of she in (131c) are coreferential with the later proper noun Blossom. This case is interesting because, as the example itself indicates, Blossom has been previously mentioned in the discourse; thus one could argue that this is a case of anaphora, not cataphora. However, the fact that the name Blossom is used later in the same sentence suggests that this is not the case. Recall that according to the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel et al.

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