Thursday 28 May 2020

Cataphoric Reference

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 625):
Alternatively, endophoric reference may point ‘forwards’ to the future of the unfolding text, that is, to a referent that is yet to be introduced. Thus in the following example, this guy indicates that more about this referent is to come:
||| One day I was sitting in the Dôme, a street café in Montparnasse quite close to [[ where we were living]] , || and this guy walked up || and said, || “I met you in 1948 or 1949. ||| My name is Harold Humes.” ||| He said || he was starting a new magazine, The Paris News-Post, || and would I become its fiction editor. |||
This type of endophoric reference is called cataphora, or cataphoric reference.


Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the cataphoric reference here is made by the demonstrative reference item this, not by the nominal group this guy.