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