Where textual cohesion meets the logical dimension: Relational anaphoric encapsulation

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of relational anaphoric encapsulation, analysed as a meeting point between the two main organizational dimensions of texts, i.e. the referential and the logical dimension. We propose a new and comprehensive definition of the strategy under consideration, based on the functional properties of the construction in which the anaphor is inserted. We analyse some examples of journalistic language, taken from a corpus of Italian news, in order to point out the main semantic and pragmatic properties of relational anaphoric encapsulation, differentiating it from other grammatical forms of interclausal linkage, such as the use of simple connectives. Finally, the examples are classified according to the syntactic features of the elements licensing the logical relation and to the presence/absence of hypostasis (the definitional property of anaphoric encapsulation, in our approach).