In this narrow sense, anaphora stands in contrast to cataphora, which sees the act of referring forward in a dialog or text, or pointing to the right in languages that are written from left to right: Ancient Greek καταφορά (kataphorá, "a downward motion"), from κατά (katá, "downwards") + φέρω (phérō, "I carry").
Both effects together are called either anaphora (broad sense) or less ambiguously, along with self-reference they comprise the category of endophora.
Anaphors and cataphors appear in bold, and their antecedents and postcedents are underlined: A further distinction is drawn between endophoric and exophoric reference.
Deictic pro-forms are stereotypical exophors, e.g. Exophors cannot be anaphors as they do not substantially refer within the dialog or text, though there is a question of what portions of a conversation or document are accessed by a listener or reader with regard to whether all references to which a term points within that language stream are noticed (i.e., if you hear only a fragment of what someone says using the pronoun her, you might never discover who she is, though if you heard the rest of what the speaker was saying on the same occasion, you might discover who she is, either by anaphoric revelation or by exophoric implication because you realize who she must be according to what else is said about her even if her identity is not explicitly mentioned, as in the case of homophoric reference).
Homophoric reference occurs when a generic phrase obtains a specific meaning through knowledge of its context.
Similarly, in discussing 'The Mayor' (of a city), the Mayor's identity must be understood broadly through the context which the speech references as general 'object' of understanding; is a particular human person meant, a current or future or past office-holder, the office in a strict legal sense, or the office in a general sense which includes activities a mayor might conduct, might even be expected to conduct, while they may not be explicitly defined for this office.
The use of the term anaphor in this narrow sense is unique to generative grammar, and in particular, to the traditional binding theory.
[7] Both semantic and pragmatics considerations attend this phenomenon, which following discourse representation theory since the early 1980s, such as work by Kamp (1981) and Heim (File Change Semantics, 1982), and generalized quantifier theory, such as work by Barwise and Cooper (1981), was studied in a series of psycholinguistic experiments in the early 1990s by Moxey and Sanford (1993) and Sanford et al.
[7] Resolving complement anaphora is of interest in shedding light on brain access to information, calculation, mental modeling, communication.
The ranking is debated, some focusing on theta relations (Yıldırım et al. 2004) and some providing definitive lists.