Anaphora in multimodal discourse

Abstract

The question is addressed whether the linguistic phenomenon of anaphora exists in multimodal dialogue. Anaphora is contrasted with deixis and ellipsis as being an essentially co-referential phenomenon; it is argued that existing discussions in the areas of HCI and presentation generation, e.g. by Singer and Wahlster, have failed to demonstrate multimodal anaphora. This is argued to be because the ‘token-referential’ nature of graphics (as opposed to the ‘type-referential’ nature of language) means that identification and predication can't be separated; hence graphics tends to be ‘unfocussed’, and re-identification of refeerents for further predication does not happen.