Understanding any communication depends on the listener or reader recognizing that some words refer to what has already been said or written (his, its, he, there, etc.). This mode of reference, anaphora, involves complicated cognitive and syntactic processes, which people usually perform unerringly, but which present formidable problems for the linguist and cognitive scientist trying to explain precisely how comprehension is achieved.
Yan Huang provides an extensive and accessible overview of the major contemporary issues surrounding anaphora and gives a critical survey of the many and diverse contemporary approaches to it. He provides by far the fullest cross-linguistic account yet published: Dr Huang's survey and analysis are based on a rich collection of data drawn from around 450 of the world's languages.

• Typologies of anaphora


• Introduction


• Typologies of anaphora


• Anaphora and syntactic categories


• Anaphora and truth-conditions


• Anaphora and contexts


• Anaphora and discourse: reference-tracking systems


• Organisation of the book


• Syntactic approaches to anaphora


• Classical Chomskyan theory of anaphora


• Typology of NPs


• Binding theory


• Control theory


• Revisions and alternatives


• Summary


• Null subjects and null objects


• Null subjects


• Null objects


• Summary


• Long-distance reflexivisation


• The phenomenon


• Properties and theoretical issues


• Long-distance reflexivisation in generative grammar


• Summary


• Conclusion


• Semantic approaches to anaphora


• VP-ellipsis


• Definition and properties


• Theoretical issues


• Two general approaches: syntactically oriented versus semantically oriented


• Summary


• Binding and control: some semantic alternatives


• Binding


• Control


• Summary


• Logophoricity


• Background


• Logophoric pronouns in African languages


• Long-distance reflexives in East Asian languages


• Discourse representation


• Summary


• Conclusion


• Pragmatic approaches to anaphora


• A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory


• A revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora


• The general pattern of anaphora


• A revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory


• Application


• Summary


• Some other pragmatic/cognitive/functional approaches


• Relevance theory


• Accessibility theory


• Prague School functionalism


• Summary


• 'Syntactic' versus 'pragmatic': a new typology of language?


• The pragmaticness of anaphora in a pragmatic language


• The prominence of 'Chinese-style' topic constructions in a pragmatic language


• Explaining the differences: parametric or typological?


• Summary


• Conclusion


• Switch-reference and discourse anaphora


• Switch-reference


• The phenomenon


• Switch-reference and related phenomena


• Two general approaches and beyond: syntactically oriented versus semantically oriented, and perhaps pragmatically oriented


• Summary


• Discourse anaphora


• The problem of anaphoric distribution in discourse


• The topic continuity or distance-interference model


• The hierarchy model


• The cognitive model


• The pragmatic model


• Summary


• Conclusion


• Conclusions


• Notes


• References


• Index of names


• Index of languages and language families


• Index of subjects

Yan Huang is Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistic Science, University of Reading.