Referentsina

Referentsina is a theoretical construct in semiotics and linguistics that describes how the referents of linguistic expressions are identified and tracked across discourse. The term fuses 'referent' with SINA, an acronym standing for Signification and Indexicality in Natural-language Analysis, a framework intended to formalize referent resolution in context-rich communication.

Origin and scope: The term was proposed in contemporary theoretical work by Lin and Kapoor (2023) as a unifying model for how speakers and listeners align intended entities with words, considering both linguistic cues and multimodal signals.

Core principles: Referentsina emphasizes four interacting factors: (1) contextual salience, or how prominently an entity features in the current discourse; (2) indexical cues from the speaker, such as pronouns, demonstratives, and deictic gestures; (3) world knowledge and discourse history; and (4) dynamic alignment, whereby referent identity can update as conversation unfolds or as new information appears.

Applications and implications: The framework informs approaches to coreference resolution in natural language processing, multimodal dialogue systems, and cross-linguistic studies of reference. It advocates modeling referent assignment as a cooperative process among speakers, listeners, and situational context rather than a purely syntactic operation.

Criticism and limitations: Some scholars argue that referentsina overgeneralizes referential behavior across cultures and modalities, while others view it as useful for integrating context with semantics in computational models. Ongoing work tests its assumptions against corpora featuring diverse languages and modalities.

See also: referent, deixis, anaphora, coreference, multimodality.