It is wrong to assume that anaphors (such as 'it', 'that', 'this') must have syntactic antecedents. Non-syntactic anaphors, i.e. anaphors with non-syntactic antecedents are very common in spoken language. Such cases can be accounted for by means of a frame semantics: anaphors can be considered as pointing back into a discourse frame. A strong claim: all antecedents are non-syntactic, which is not to say that they cannot be syntactic as well, in which case they are syntactic and non-syntactic simultaneously.