Endophora refers to the phenomenon of expressions that derive their reference from something within the surrounding text (endophors).
For example, in the sentences "I saw Sally yesterday. She was lying on the beach", "she" is an ''endophoric'' expression because it refers to something mentioned elsewhere in the text, i.e. "Sally".
By contrast, "She was lying on the beach," if it appeared by itself, contains an
''exophoric'' expression; "she" refers to something that is not present in the surrounding text, so there is not enough information given within the text to independently determine to whom "she" refers. It can refer to someone the speaker assumes his audience has prior knowledge of, or it can refer to a person he is showing to his listeners. Without further information, in other words, there is no way of knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term.
Endophora can be broken into three subcategories:
cataphora
In linguistics, cataphora (; from Greek, '' καταφορά'', ''kataphora'', "a downward motion" from '' κατά'', ''kata'', "downwards" and '' φέρω'', ''pherō'', "I carry") is the use of an expression or word that co-refers with a later, ...
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anaphora and
self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philos ...
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See also
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References
Semantics
Pragmatics
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