Definition:
The use of a pronoun or other linguistic unit to refer ahead to another word in a sentence. Adjective: cataphoric. See also:
Etymology
From the Greek, "backward" + "carry"Examples and Observations:
- "It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers."
(Joan Didion, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem") - "In 'The Pendulum Years,' his history of the 1960s, Bernard Levin writes of the 'collective insanity which seized Britain.'"
(The London Evening Standard, February 8, 1994, quoted by Katie Wales in Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English, Cambridge University Press, 1996) - A few weeks before he died, my father gave me an old cigar box filled with faded letters.
- "If she were alive today, [Barbara] Tuchman would surely be preparing to pen fresh furious pages tonight, as the president seeks to rally his faltering domestic popularity with summonses of support."
(Martin Kettle, "If He Resists the Siren Voice of Folly, Blair's Legacy Is Secure," The Guardian, June 25, 2005) - Too scared to buy before they sell, some homeowners aim for a trade.
- "[S]ome prescriptive grammarians have gone so far as to condemn the practice [of cataphora], for reasons of clarity and, more blandly, 'good style.' So H.W. Fowler declares 'the pronoun should rarely precede its principal,' a view echoed by Gowers . . .. This has led to problems in terminology. The term antecedent, for example,is commonly used to refer to a coreferential NP in an anaphoric relation; there is no equivalent expression for the *postcedent NP, however. But by an odd semantic license, some grammarians, and of different schools of thought, use antecedent in this sense."
(Katie Wales, Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English, Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Pronunciation: ke-TAF-eh-ra
Also Known As: anticipatory anaphora, backward anaphora, cataphoric reference
