Referentstobe

Referentstobe is a term used in linguistics and discourse analysis to describe discourse referents whose exact identity is deferred to a later point in a text or conversation. The concept functions as a placeholder or marker for upcoming entities, allowing analysts to track how information is distributed across clauses without prematurely naming the referent.

In annotation schemes and natural language processing, referentstobe tags signal that a referent exists in the discourse and will be resolved later, often in the next sentence or in subsequent discourse. They are related to forward references and to the broader problem of coreference resolution, where an antecedent must be linked to later mentions. The notion also intersects with cataphora, where a future referent appears before its description is provided, and with discourse deixis, where a referent’s prominence shifts with the discourse context.

Example use in analysis and annotation: a sentence may introduce a referent with a placeholder tag such as [ReferentToBe] and later sentences specify the actual identity. This helps researchers study how writers manage information structure and how readers or automated systems resolve identity over time.

Applications of referentstobe include corpus annotation for coreference tasks, planning and generation in natural language systems, and literary or rhetorical analysis of how writers defer identification for emphasis or suspense. Challenges include resolving ambiguity when multiple entities could fill the placeholder and handling cross-linguistic variation in how placeholders are realized in discourse.

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