Anafory

Anafory is a linguistic term used to describe words or phrases that refer back to an element mentioned earlier in discourse, known as the antecedent. They contribute to textual cohesion by linking sentences and helping readers or listeners recover who or what is being discussed without repeating the same noun.

Elements typically classified as anafory include personal pronouns (he, she, they), demonstratives (this, that, those), definite noun phrases when they point back to an earlier entity, and certain ellipses where the antecedent is recoverable from context. Anafory are distinguished from cataphora, which points forward to a later element rather than backward to an antecedent.

A common type is the anaphoric pronoun, as in: John arrived late. He apologized. Here, the pronoun he is an anafory referring to John. Zero anaphora also occurs in some languages, where the antecedent is present in the discourse but no explicit anafor is required, often due to subject pronoun omission in pro‑drop languages.

In linguistic research, anafory play a central role in theories of reference and cohesion. They are also a focus in computational linguistics, where coreference resolution aims to identify the antecedents of anafory to interpret text accurately in tasks such as information extraction, question answering, and summarization. Cross-linguistic variation affects how much and what kinds of anafory a language relies on, reflecting differences in morphology, syntax, and discourse practices.