A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§8.1 Deictic and anaphoric uses of pronouns^101

In this section we deal with just the first two types: the others will be covered in the

chapters that deal with interrogative and relative clauses: see Ch. 9, §2.4, and

Ch. 11, §§3-4.

8.1 Deictic and anaphoric uses of pronouns

Most pronouns are characteristically used either deictically or anaphor-

ically.

(a) Deictic uses of pronouns

The term deixis applies to the use of expressions in which the meaning can be traced
directly to features of the act of utterance - when and where it takes place, and who
is involved as speaker and as addressee. In their primary meaning, for example, now
and here are used deictically to refer respectively to the time and place of the utter­
ance. Similarly, this country is likely to be interpreted deictically as the country in
which the utterance takes place. Several of the pronouns are predominantly used
deictically, with I and we referring to the speaker and a group including the speaker,
you to the addressee(s) or a set including the addressee(s).

(b) Anaphoric uses of pronouns

The term anaphora applies to the use of expressions in which the meaning is
derived from another expression in the surrounding linguistic material. That other
expression is called the antecedent. The pronouns in [50] are underlined and their
antecedents are doubly underlined.

[50] ill said she was unavailable.

ii The victim's daughter didn 't come to the meeting. Liz said she was unavailable.

iii When I last saw her, ill seemed to be extremely busy.

!:!! In the most obvious interpretation for [i], she refers to Liz - and it does so by

virtue of its anaphoric relation to the antecedent Liz in the main clause.

l) That is not the only interpretation, however. In [ii], the same sentence occurs in

a context where she is much more likely to be interpreted as referring to the

victim's daughter. The antecedent is located in an earlier sentence.

• The antecedent usually precedes the pronoun (the Latin prefix ante· means
  "before"), but under certain conditions it can follow, as in [iii].
  The traditional term 'pronoun' has a Latin origin (like 'antecedent'), and the mean­
  ing suggests it serves for or on behalf of a noun. This is based on the anaphoric use,
  but it unfortunately suggests that a pronoun is used in place of a noun, which is
  not correct. An anaphoric pronoun stands in place of a full noun phrase. In [ii],
  for example, she could be replaced by the antecedent NP (Liz said the victim's
  daughter was unavailable), but not by the head noun (*Liz said daughter was
  unavailable).