anaptyxis 25

by word-order). The term is seen in opposition to synthetic (and some-

times also polysynthetic) languages (which include agglutinative and
inflecting types), where words typically contain more than one morpheme.
Several languages of South-East Asia illustrate analyticity in their word struc-
ture. As always in such classifications, the categories are not clear-cut: different
languages will display the characteristic of analyticity to a greater or lesser
degree.
(2) Considerable use is made in semantics of the sense of analytic found in
logic and philosophy, where an analytic proposition/sentence is one whose gram-
matical form and lexical meaning make it necessarily true, e.g. Spinsters are
unmarried women. The term contrasts with synthetic, where the truth of the
proposition is established using empirical criteria.

analyticity (n.) see analytic

anaphor (n.) A term used in government-binding theory to refer to a type

of noun phrase which has no independent reference, but refers to some other
sentence constituent (its antecedent). Anaphors include reflexive pronouns
(e.g. myself ), reciprocal pronouns (e.g. each other), and np-traces. Along
with pronominals and lexical noun phrases (R-expressions), anaphors are
of particular importance as part of a theory of binding: in this context, an
anaphor must be bound in its governing category (condition A). The term
has a more restricted application than the traditional term anaphoric. See also
anaphora.

anaphora (n.) A term used in grammatical description for the process

or result of a linguistic unit deriving its interpretation from some previously
expressed unit or meaning (the antecedent). Anaphoric reference is one way of
marking the identity between what is being expressed and what has already
been expressed. In such a sentence as He did that there, each word has an
anaphoric reference (i.e. they are anaphoric substitutes, or simply anaphoric
words): the previous sentence might have been John painted this picture in
Bermuda, for instance, and each word in the response would be anaphorically
related to a corresponding unit in the preceding context. Anaphora is often
contrasted with cataphora (where the words refer forward), and sometimes
with deixis or exophora (where the words refer directly to the extralinguistic
situation). It may, however, also be found subsuming both forwards- and
backwards-referring functions. The process of establishing the antecedent of
an anaphor is called anaphora (or anaphor) resolution, and is an important
research aim in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. See also
anaphor, zero.

anaphoric (adj.) see anaphora

anaptyctic (adj.) see anaptyxis

anaptyxis /anapct}ks}s/ (n.) A term used in comparative philology, and some-

times in phonology, to refer to a type of intrusion, where an extra vowel
has been inserted between two consonants; a type of epenthesis. Anaptyctic