A typology of anaphoric and cataphoric relations expressed by English complex determiners Tine Breban, Kristin Davidse *, Lobke Ghesquie ` re University of Leuven, Functional Linguistics Leuven unit, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21, PO Box 3308, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium 1. Introduction Work on anaphoric and cataphoric relations has so far concentrated mainly on the question of how they are signalled by simple determiners such as the definite article and demonstratives, as illustrated in (1) and (2). (1) We saw some tall ships in the harbour; the boats were here for the Bicentennial. (Martin, 1992:126) (2) This is what bothers me – you can’t trust them. (Martin, 1992:123) In (1) the in the boats indicates that these boats are presumed known. To identify them, the hearer 1 has to retrieve the set introduced by some tall ships in the preceding text, i.e. effect anaphoric retrieval of the antecedent. To identify this in (2), the hearer has to relate it to the postcedent you can’t trust them, which is cataphoric retrieval. We will use Martin’s (1992:124) cover term ‘‘phoric’’ for both anaphoric and cataphoric relations. In the tradition of Halliday and Hasan (1976:Ch. 2), Martin (1992:99) defines anaphoric and cataphoric items as signalling that information Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2689–2703 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 5 December 2010 Received in revised form 29 April 2011 Accepted 30 April 2011 Available online 15 June 2011 Keywords: Anaphora Cataphora Complex determiner Generalized reference Coreferentiality ABSTRACT Traditionally, the study of anaphoric and cataphoric relations has focused mainly on their coding by simple determiners such as the or this. In this paper, we will show that complex determiners, i.e. combinations of a primary and secondary determiner such as the same, another, the fifth, construct phoric relations of greater complexity or with added semantic- pragmatic features in comparison with simple determiners. We propose a typology of the five basic types of phoric relations expressed by complex determiners. Like simple determiners, they can (i) signal the retrievability of an instance and (ii) express generalized reference. However, they add features such as emphasis to the coreferentiality relation, and they make the basis for generalization, e.g. comparison, explicit. Complex determiners can also express three types of phoric relations which cannot be conveyed by simple determiners. They can (i) introduce a new instance of phorically given type specifications, (ii) set up a phoric relation between a given reference mass and a definite proportion of it, and (iii) establish reference to an instance identified vis-a ` -vis a previous instance on a scale. The framework we use to discuss these phoric relations is a general cognitive- functional one, drawing mainly on Langacker (1991, 2001). ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +32 16 32 48 11; fax: +32 16 32 47 67. E-mail addresses: tine.breban@arts.kuleuven.be (T. Breban), kristin.davidse@arts.kuleuven.be (K. Davidse), lobke.ghesquiere@arts.kuleuven.be (L. Ghesquie ` re). 1 ‘‘Speaker’’ and ‘‘hearer’’ will be used as cover terms for the speaker and hearer in spoken communication and the writer and reader of written texts. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.04.013