Di che cosa parliamo quando siamo infedeli? Alcune puntualizzazioni sulle valenze di rinvio: anafora, catafora ed esofora

Abstract

In my paper, I draw an overall picture of the "referential valencies" of a text, i.e. of what we could call the text's referential skeleton. Based on Italian evidence, I give examples of the many kinds of anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric reference, including elliptical null forms, and I pay special attention to a phenomenon that has been very little debated in the literature, viz "unfaithful" (i.e. lexically varied, e.g. hyperonymic) anaphors, trying to answer the question "What do we talk about when we are unfaithful?". Not surprisingly, the use of unfaithful anaphors depends considerably on the text type, such anaphors being e.g. more frequent in argumentative and narrative texts than in technical texts, and on the degree of text elaboration. This section of my paper is empirically based on three typologically different text corpora.