Anaphoricity in Connectives: A Case Study on German

Abstract

Anaphoric connectives are event anaphors (or abstract anaphors) that in addition convey a coherence relation holding between the antecedent and the host clause of the connective. Some of them carry an explicitly-anaphoric morpheme, others do not. We analysed the set of German connectives for this property and found that many have an additional non-connective reading, where they serve as nominal anaphors. Furthermore, many connectives can have multiple senses, so altogether the processing of these words can involve substantial disambiguation. We study the problem for one specific German word, demzufolge, which can be taken as representative for a large group of similar words.