Dictionary

cataphor en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /-ˌfɔː/ (Received-Pronunciation)
• /ˈkatəfə/ (Received-Pronunciation)
• /-ˌfɔɹ/ (US)
• /ˈkætəfɚ/ (US)

Etymology

From Latin cataphora (“a coma”), from Ancient Greek καταφορά (kataphorá, “a bringing down, a lethargic attack”).

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) Semicoma.
2. (countable, uncountable) Somnolence marked by periods of partial consciousness.
3. (countable, uncountable) The use of a pronoun or other linguistic unit to refer ahead to another word in a sentence.
   • Yet, all psycholinguistic studies, syntax processing, logic based grammars, poetry parsing and even formal parser construction, indicate that resolving anaphor is much easier than cataphor; we therefore collect an additional code point for any cataphor. 1990, Golumbic, Martin Charles, Advances in artificial intelligence : natural language and knowledge-based systems:
   • It was hypothesized that the cataphor this would signal that a concept is likely to be mentioned again in the following story and that therefore the this-cataphor results in a higher activation. 2001, Text representation : linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects:
   • Here, the cataphor she refers to Susan. It is quite common to use the term “antecedent” also for an expression to which a cataphor refers. 2015, Anaphora Resolution and Text Retrieval - A Linguistic Analysis of Hypertexts:

Forms

wikipedia: cataphor