Intersentential

In linguistics, intersentential is an adjective describing phenomena that occur across sentence boundaries rather than within a single sentence. It contrasts with intra-sentential or intrasentential phenomena, which are contained inside one sentence. The term is used in discourse analysis, syntax, and semantics to describe how information is linked or referenced from one sentence to the next.

Common intersentential phenomena include intersentential anaphora, where a pronoun or demonstrative in one sentence refers to an antecedent in a preceding sentence (for example: "John finished the report. He submitted it to his supervisor."). Intersentential discourse markers—such as therefore, however, and nevertheless—signal relations between sentences and help guide interpretation across the discourse. Cross-sentence deixis can also occur when expressions anchor references to items introduced earlier in the text or conversation.

The distinction between intersentential and intrassentential connections is important in both theoretical linguistics and applied fields. In formal analyses, researchers track how entities, events, and relations are established and maintained across sentence boundaries. In applied contexts, such as natural language processing and computational linguistics, recognizing intersentential dependencies is crucial for tasks like coreference resolution, discourse parsing, machine translation, and summarization, where coherence and reference often rely on information distributed across multiple sentences.