Anaphora
Anaphora is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the interpretation of an occurrence of one expression depends on the interpretation of an occurrence of another or whereby an occurrence of an expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some other expression in the same or another sentence.[1] However, these are at best very rough characterizations of the phenomena, since things other than anaphoric expressions satisfy the first characterization and many cases of anaphora fail to satisfy the second. For example, in some sense of “interpretation”, the interpretation of the expression “bank” in the following sentence depends on the interpretation of other expressions (in particular, “of the river”):
- 1. John is down by the bank of the river.
But no one would say this is an example of anaphora. And as to the second characterization, though all agree that the following is an example of anaphora (and “he” is an anaphoric pronoun here on one reading of the sentence), it is not a case of the referent of one expression being supplied by another expression, (since “he” is not a referring expression on the reading in question):
- 2. Every male lawyer believes he is smart.
Hence, rather than attempting to characterize anaphora generally and abstractly, we shall begin with some examples. There is generally thought to be many types of anaphora, though in some cases there is disagreement as to whether to classify those cases as anaphora or not.[2]
Pronominal anaphora:
- 3. John left. He said he was ill. (The antecedent is “John” and the anaphoric expression is “he”.)
Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anaphora/
Chatbot
It means the deliberate repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines.
Purpose: emphasis, rhythm, and cohesion. It forces the reader to register a theme or claim.
Example:
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…” (Churchill)
In philosophy and linguistics, “anaphora” can also mean something narrower: a word (often a pronoun) that refers back to an earlier expression.
Example:
“John arrived late. He was tired.”
Here, he is an anaphoric reference to John.
If you want: rhetorical anaphora vs. linguistic anaphora, or analysis of anaphora in poetry.
First, meaning and reference.
Philosophy of language studies how words get their meaning. Anaphora forces you to explain how a term like “he,” “this,” or “that” can have content without naming anything by itself. The meaning depends on context, prior sentences, and shared understanding. This is central to theories by Frege, Russell, Strawson, Kaplan, and contemporary semantics.
Second, structure of thought.
Philosophers care about whether language mirrors thought or shapes it. Anaphora shows that thoughts are not isolated propositions but connected structures. You cannot interpret an anaphoric sentence atomically; you need memory, temporal order, and coherence. That matters for logic, philosophy of mind, and theories of reasoning.
Third, rhetoric and persuasion.
From Plato onward, philosophers worried about how form influences belief. Rhetorical anaphora demonstrates that repetition can generate conviction independently of truth. Aristotle treats this under rhetoric; Nietzsche later treats it as a stylistic force that creates values and affects judgment. This raises epistemic questions: when are we convinced by reasons, and when by form?
In short: anaphora matters because it exposes that meaning, thinking, and persuasion are not purely logical or self-contained. Language works through relations, memory, and repetition, and philosophy cannot ignore that.
Wikipedia
In linguistics, anaphora (/əˈnæfərə/) is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor (and an anaphor in the broader sense, but not in a narrower one). Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic (contextually dependent) expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.
Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on different levels: first, anaphora indicates how discourse is constructed and maintained; second, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together at the level of the sentence; third, anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing in computational linguistics, since the identification of the reference can be difficult; and fourth, anaphora partially reveals how language is understood and processed, which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in cognitive psychology.
Nochrisis 