Anafora e coreferenza: riflessioni in prospettiva teorica

This paper deals with the notions of anaphora and coreference, with a special focus on written Italian. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it presents the various definitions of anaphora and coreference used in linguistics and zooms in on those that best apply to text linguistics. The definition of anaphora proposed in this paper focuses on the morphosyntactic features suggesting a referential dependency, whereas coreference is conceived of as a simple equivalence among referential expressions, irrespective of their referential dependency or independency. Secondly, in order to test the proposed definitions, the paper analyzes examples – mainly taken from written Italian press – where either anaphora or coreference is at stake, but not both of them. The second part of the paper will show that, among cohesive relations, there are anaphoric phenomena that do not imply coreference between two expressions, and coreferential phenomena that do not imply anaphoric dependency. The definitions proposed in the first part of the paper are useful for dealing with some controversial cases of referential cohesion, and for deciding how to categorize them with regard to the concepts of anaphora and coreference.