A Contrastive Analysis of Reference in English and Persian: Anaphora Reference

In linguistics, an anaphora is a type of expression whose reference depends on another referential element. E.g., in the sentence Sally preferred the company of herself , herself is an anaphoric expression in that it is coreferential with the expression in subject position. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic—for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent. The term anaphor, an English singular variant, is sometimes used to designate an individual use: an anaphor is a linguistic entity which indicates a referential tie to some other linguistic entity in the same text. [1] Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on different levels. First, anaphora indicates how discourse is constructed and maintained . Second, on the level of the sentence, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together. Third, in computational linguistics anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing, since the identification of the reference can be challenging. Fourth, anaphora tells us some things about how language is understood and processed , which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in cognitivepsychology