Referentwhether

Referentwhether is a term used in linguistics to describe the relationship between a referent and a content clause introduced by the conjunction whether. It is proposed as a shorthand for discussing how referents are anchored or recovered when a sentence contains an indirect question or a reported speech clause.

Such clauses denote a proposition that may be uncertain or debated. The referentwhether concerns how the surrounding discourse identifies the object of inquiry—the entity about which the question is asked or the proposition whose truth is being evaluated. In this way, referentwhether foregrounds the link between the referential expression in the matrix context and the embedded content that the whether-clause presents as unknown or disputed.

Example: "I am unsure whether the project will succeed." Here, referentwhether would describe the mapping from the embedded proposition to the discourse, i.e., what the question is about and which entity or event it targets in context. The focus is on how the embedded content clause inherits or interacts with its matrix environment to determine its referential interpretation.

Cross-linguistic variation and theoretical status: Many languages employ whether- or if-clauses to express indirect questions or reported propositions, but the exact referential mechanics can vary across languages. The term referentwhether is not universally standardized and appears primarily in certain theoretical or computational discussions as a way to discuss how reference is allocated within complex clauses.

See also: indirect questions, content clauses, referential theory, discourse anaphora.