Diskursreferenten

Diskursreferenten is a term used in linguistics and discourse analysis to denote entities that are introduced and tracked within a discourse or text. Such referents may correspond to real-world objects, persons, events, or fictional entities, but their status as diskursreferenten is determined by their role in the discourse rather than by external reality. They are established through linguistic expressions such as proper names, definite noun phrases, pronouns, or demonstratives and are activated in the reader’s or listener’s mental representation to maintain coherence across sentences.

In practice, diskursreferenten are monitored across clauses and sentences. When a referent is mentioned by a pronoun or a definite description, it signals that a particular entity is being discussed. New referents are introduced to shift the topic or focus, and existing referents are reactivated to preserve continuity. This mechanism supports anaphora resolution and global coherence within a text.

Diskursreferenten are typically considered endophoric references, anchored within the discourse itself, as opposed to exophoric references that point to elements outside the text. They play a central role in coreference analysis, readability studies, and theories of discourse structure. In applied fields, recognizing diskursreferenten aids natural language processing tasks such as coreference resolution and discourse parsing, contributing to more coherent text generation and understanding.

See also: anaphora, coreference, discourse coherence, deixis.