Referenti

Referenti is a term used in linguistics, semiotics, and the philosophy of language to denote the object, concept, or entity that a sign, word, or expression stands for in a given context. The plural form referenti corresponds to referents in English. The concept helps distinguish between a linguistic form and what it refers to in the real world, a discourse, or a mental representation.

In everyday language, the cat refers to a particular cat in the speaker’s environment, so that cat is the referent of the expression in that context. In a general statement like Dogs bark, the referent can be the entire class of dogs within the utterance’s scope.

Referents can be concrete objects, events, or abstract ideas. They may be real, fictional, or hypothetical; context, discourse, and world knowledge determine which entity counts as the referent at a given moment.

In philosophy of language, the referent is contrasted with sense or meaning, the information by which a term picks out its referent. This distinction helps explain why two expressions can share a referent but convey different cognitive content. In semantics and pragmatics, researchers study how referents shift across contexts, how pronouns find antecedents, and how reference is established in discourse.

See also denotation, extension, reference, sense, and referential.