Referentiestämme

Referentiestämme is a term appearing in some German-language linguistic discussions to describe a class of stems that anchor a referential meaning across related forms of a lexeme. The exact meaning of referentiestämme is not standardized and can vary between authors, but the general idea is to identify a base form or stem that carries the core referential content for a given referent within a lexical network.

In morphology, referentiestämme are often conceived as the base form from which related words derived from the same referent are built. For example, in German, the stem Hund- associated with the animal referent can be linked to related forms such as Hund (dog), Hunde (dogs), Hundes (genitive), and compound derivatives that share the same referent. In semantics, the concept may be used to separate the referential content—the object or concept—from its surface linguistic realization, focusing on the linkage between forms and their real-world or conceptual referents.

In computational linguistics and corpus linguistics, referentiestämme can be used as canonical forms for lemmatization or as units to group tokens that refer to the same entity in coreference analysis. Because the terminology is not universally established, different researchers may define the scope and criteria for a referentiestamm differently, ranging from strict morphological bases to broader anchors of referential meaning.

Relation to related concepts: referentiestämme intersects with lemma, stem, base form, lexical semantics, and coreference resolution, but it emphasizes the connection between a linguistic form and its referential content. See also lemma, stem, lexical semantics, morphology, and coreference resolution.