Lexical anaphors in Danish and French

The article treats lexically varied noun-phrase anaphors, so-called ‘unfaithful anaphors’, which are found more frequently in French than in Danish texts. The difference is related to more fundamental differences between the two languages, and types of language, at different linguistic levels. Thus, French lexicalises more semantic content in nouns than in verbs, and vice versa in Danish, the former language preferring exocentric ordering at the syntactic level compared to Danish endocentric ordering. Much of the information of unfaithful anaphors being new, French can be said to communicate presupposed information, where Danish ‘poses’, i.e. states new information. And finally, in French the semantic content of an unfaithful anaphor often entertains a rhetorical relation with its host predicate, where Danish sets the relation explicitly.