Anaphore associative et anaphore possessive

Abstract

This paper is devoted to associative anaphora and possessive anaphora with two kinds of nouns. One is meronyms, where a noun denotes a concept that is a part of another as in trunk/tree. The other is what I call “functionally localized” nouns, such as church with respect to village, where the latter denotes a concept that normally implies the existence of the concept denoted by the former : see Kleiber (2001). We first evoke the referential properties of these two kinds of anaphora. The properties of the possessive determiner are then discussed in order to explain its occasional incompatibility with meronyms or functionally localized nouns. Finally, we elucidate the consequences for the choice between associative and possessive anaphora upon textual coherence relations, in particular Claim-Evidence (Cornish, 2009a, b) and Explanation.