Western Efforts to Study Referral

Abstract

 This research deals with reference as an important tool of text cohesion as it contributes effectively to relate between the different parts of the text. This textual relation can be realized by the repetition of the word or its meaning. So, it is rather a semantic concept more than a grammatical one, which refers to the link between the “ deictic element” and the “referential one”.

Reference has two kinds contextual and textual which has in its turn two types: anaphoric and cataphoric. The contextual reference means the reference of a referential linguistic element to a linguistic deictic element, which means that the referential element does not exist within the text but outside it, while the textual reference means the reference of  a linguistic referential element to a linguistic deictic element, whether it is anaphoric or cataphoric.