1. Introduction
English possesses a fair number of pronouns that take their interpretation from some other part of the sentence or discourse, as in the following example, in which the anaphoric device is in boldface and the antecedent, from which it takes its interpretation, is italicized:

(1) Two boys stood near a jeweller’s shop. They saw a man break its window and steal all the watches. They ran after him because they took him for a thief.

As the example shows, the pronouns are co-referential with the preceding Lexical NPs, i.e. the antecedents. However, the antecedent is not always placed before, as in (2):

(1’) Near him, Dan saw a snake.

The placement of antecedent suggests a difference between anaphoric pronouns (AP; as in (1)) and cataphoric ones (CP; as in (2)), that is, those that look back in the text for their interpretation and those that look forward for their interpretation.

The pronoun makes too large a category to be explored in this paper. Therefore, my analysis will be within the scope of personal pronouns, including the nominative (“they”), accusative (“him”, “her”, “it”) and possesive (“his”, “her”, “its”) cases. Also, only the third person is involved here, because the first and second person forms are normally interpreted exophorically, directly referring to the person or object in the situational context.

Cataphoric pronouns are found both within and across sentences. For the former cases, they are subject to specific constrains; and for the latter, they contribute to certain stylistic features . These are the major aspects to be studied in the following parts, compared with the Chinese equivalents respectively.

2. Cataphoric pronouns on the sentence-level

2.1 Constraints in English

2.1.1 Cataphors in formal sentences ---- a GB account

The fact that cataphoric reference occurs less frequently per se suggests that cataphor is under more strict constrains than anaphor. To find out what they are, first we will see some examples from Quirk (1985).

(2) Before hei joined the Navy, Geraldi made peace with his family.

(3) Melville well knew that to the men who sailed in heri, a whaleri was anything but a pleasure boat.

(4) On hisi arrival in the capital, the Secretary of Statei declared support for the government.

(5) As soon as hei heard the news, Johni passed out.

Observing the above sentences proposed by Quirk, we could find something common . That is, all of them contain a subordinate clause where a pronoun appears and refers forward to the full lexical NP in the superordinate clause. It seems to us that a pronoun can be used as cataphor IFF it is contained in the subordinate clause, which is initially positoned.

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This condition is clarified by Quirk in his A Comprehensive Grammar of English as “Cataphoric reference generally occurs only when the pronoun is at a lower level of structure than its antecedent”. Here “level” refers to the levels of branching on the tree diagram, which can be simplified into a scale towards a lower position in the construction structure of the sentence:

Sentence → Clause → Phrase → Words → Morphemes

Therefore, while the antecedent is placed in the main clause, the pronoun “he” in (2) is a constituent in an adverbial clause, “her” in (3) a relative clause, and “his” in (4) appears as part of the complement of an initial prepositional phrase.

The condition of subordination well explains why co-refrentiality is valid in “Jacqueline thinks she understands me” but not in “She thinks Jacqueline understands me”. (“She” and “he” must be understood as referring to two different people.)

While laying down the principle of subordination, Quirk points out that there are exceptions. “In journalistic writing, in particular, there is occasional use of cataphoric pronouns which appear in non-inferior positions.”

(6) Failure of hisi latest attempt on the world record has caused heavy financial loss to the backers of daredevil balloonist Felix Champi.

This simple sentence, in which the level of “his” is no lower than that of “John”, is clearly a derivation from Quirk’s account. Taling sentences like the following into consideration, we will find “exceptions” go far beyond journalistic writing.

(7) His mother loved Johni/j.[1]

Various proposals have been formulated to account for sentences like this, among which Reinhart’s c-command model is the most successful. It essentially states that, if the first branching node dominating the pronoun within the syntactic tree also dominates the full noun phrase, corefrence is ruled out. The c-command condition has since been incorporated as pricinple C into the Binding Conditions, which are at the core of the GB theory. The Binding conditions include three parts:

A. An anaphor must be coreferential with a NP (in its local domain) that c-commands it;

B. A pronoun must be disjoint with the NP (in its local domain) that c- commands it;

C. A referential expression must be disjoint with all the NPs that c-command it.

Among these three conditions, C is most closely associated with my discussion in this paper, from which two sub-principles can be deduced:

a. If αc-commandsβ, they must be in disjoint reference;

b. Ifαdoes not c-commandsβ, they may or may not be co-referential.

(In fact, these two are two sides of the coin, in a complementary distribution to each other. The optionality of b which invloves pragmatic factors will not be covered in this paper that is intended for a general syntactic framework.) Now, with the syntactic conditons, we can probably explain the cataphoric reference in situations other than subordination.

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Referring back to example (7), I will give another sentence below with similar construction for comparison.

(7’) Hei loved Johnj.

(7) Hisi mother loved Johni/j.

By intuition we can figure out that in (7’) “he” and “John” cannot refer to the same individual. To achieve co-refrentiality, it should be revised as “He loved himself.” Or “John loved himself”, because the reflexive pronoun, typical of the anaphor, must be bound by its antecedent. (See condition A.)

The following tree diagrams are sketched out to reveal their respective syntactic structures.

Hei loved Johnj.
Hisi mother loved Johni/j.
The two NPs in the sentence are circled to foreground their positions in reference to each other. The tree diagram for (7’) shows that the NP “he” c-commands the VP node and its inferior nodes, thus c-commanding the NP “John”. This relationship of commanding accounts for the disjoint refrence between two NPs. On the contrary, the NP “his” of example (7) c-commands nothing but its neighboring node N. In other words, “his” does not c-command “John”; this relationship of non-commanding brings “his” and “John” to a same refrence.

The criterion of c-commanding provides an easy interpretation for complex sentences in which the subordinate clause is regarded as an adverbial, because adverial, as shown below, does not c-command the node of the lexical NP.
2.1.2 NP tags ------ a functional analysis

While the binding conditons account for the cataphoric reading from a syntactic perspective, they fail to interprete the cataphoric use of pronouns in some syntactically informal circumstances.

(8) Theyi are good, these peachesi.

(9) I know themi, meni.

(10) I wouldn’t trust himi for a moment, that ladi.

It is easy to claim co-refrence between pronouns and lexical NPs in these cases, where “an amplificatory NP tag is added to the end of a sentence, repeating and clarifying the meaning of a pronoun within it”. This construction, occurring frequently, is considered as sub-standard. Even more familiar are cases where the operator is included in the NP tag.

(11) Shei’s a lovely girl, is Anni.

(12) Hei likes a drink now and then, Jimi does.

Then, what is the motivation behind? Halliday and Hasan (1976) labelled the pronoun here as “substitute theme”.

To illuastrate this point, first a brief review of the Theme-Rheme construction is in demand. As we all know, the usual discourse takes a linear order of theme-rheme pattern. Theme, of course, is the element, which serves as the point of departure of the message with which the clause is concerned. The remainder of the message, the part in which Theme is developed, is called in Prague school terminology Rheme. It is believed that the movement from Theme (or Given Information) to Rheme (or New Information) reveals the pattern of human thinking. And, in terms of tone unit, the new information that is reserved to the end is regarded as enf-focus where the nucleus lies.

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