³The distinction between anaphora and deixis is fairly complex and fuzzy around the edges. There appears to be no maximum allowable distance between an antecedent and its anaphoric pronoun, and the farther the pronoun occurs from its antecedent, the harder it becomes to differentiate it from a deictic pronoun. Anaphora is traditionally defined in contrast to deixis, based on the differentiation between intralinguistic and extralinguistic reference (Huddleston [1984: 274–84] well exemplifies this traditional approach). Anaphoric pronouns are dependent on their linguistic context for interpretation; they are anaphoric to the antecedent, and their gender, therefore, reflects the linguistic gender of the noun or noun-phrase acting as the antecedent. Deictic pronouns are situation-dependent and refer outside the linguistic context to the "real world" referent. Cornish (1986), however, argues that purely syntactic explanations of anaphora are insufficient; anaphoric agreement patterns cannot be adequately explained using only syntactic rules and constraints because anaphora is fundamentally a discourse phenomenon: not only does its domain exceed the sentence, but it carries specific discourse functions, which are as predictable as syntactic constraints and can override them. Anaphora presupposes a common pre-existing focus and it serves as a mechanism for the maintenance of a common object of focus within a discourse. Deixis involves the introduction of a new object of focus within the discourse, so it serves to shift the pre-existing focus to a new object, which will become the focus of the subsequent stretch of discourse (and hence a possible object for anaphora). These alternate definitions of anaphora and deixis do not rely exclusively on the notion of an antecedent because, as he argues, it is not a necessary or sufficient condition for anaphora:
"The discourse entity to which the anaphor refers . . . need not, however, have been explicitly introduced by linguistic means within the discourse model which each participant is constructing as the discourse progresses: it may have been derived via an inference on the basis of some such explicitly realised linguistic expression, or via the participants jointly focusing upon some perceptually available entity within the context-of-utterance, or it may already have been available through general or specific socio-cultural real-world knowledge, or simply by being an issue of continuing mutual concern to the participants involved." (Cornish 1986: 3)
According to this definition, the power of anaphoric elements to "refer back" need not be limited to the syntactic structure. The distinction between intralinguistic and extralinguistic reference remains fundamental to this definition of anaphora and deixis, but intralinguistic reference is extended to include larger elements of discourse. The studies in this book, which are entirely text-based, do not necessarily require this wider discourse-based definition of anaphora, but it does benefit from its flexibility in determining a pronoun's antecedent or basis for agreement. See Newman (1997: 63–116) for a valuable, more detailed discussion of anaphora and theoretical accounts of pronouns.
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