Anaphora

In Christian liturgy, the anaphora is the part of the Liturgy or Mass having to do specifically with the Eucharist, as compared to scripture readings, etc.

In rhetoric, anaphora is the repetition of the same few words at the beginning of several consecutive sentences for rhetorical effect.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

— Winston Churchill.

In linguistics, anaphora names the effect of one expression referring to another.

In the example:

The monkey ate the banana because it was hungry

"it" referring to the monkey is an example of anaphora.

Anaphora is defined by some linguists to only include references to preceding text. Those linguists would define forward-references as cataphora and call both effects together endophora.

Another example of reference is exophora, where the referent does not appear in the text, but instead in the real world.

Other linguists would define anaphora generically to include all of these referential effects.

fr:Anaphore

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