A corpus-based study of anaphora related to indefinite pronouns

Abstract

Indefinite pronouns are words which replace nouns without specifying which noun they replace. A question asked by English students is: how to use anaphora to refer to indefinite pronouns, since they can refer to any gender? In English, there is not a pronoun that can refer to a specific gender nor how to define the gender through the use of articles such as in Portuguese. Our objective is to understand what words or expressions are most often used to make anaphoric references to indefinite pronouns. The following indefinite pronouns were analyzed: ‘someone’, ‘somebody’, ‘anyone’, ‘anybody’. Our data for analysis was extracted from newspaper texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). We observed the first 50 occurrences of each pronoun in the corpus to see which ones present anaphors and to see what words or expressions are most often used to make anaphoric references.