Refereri

Refereri is a theoretical construct in linguistics and semiotics that describes a system for organizing referents within discourse. It treats referents as multi-layered entities comprising content (the referent itself), form (the linguistic expression signaling it), and context (the situational information surrounding its use).

Origin and usage: The term was proposed in academic discussions to address limitations of traditional pronoun and anaphora analyses, especially in cross-linguistic comparison and in dialogue. The framework aims to clarify how speakers establish and maintain reference across sentences and turns in conversation.

Structure: A refereri analysis uses three core components: referential index (a pointer to the referent within discourse), referential anchor (the central reference point in the current context), and referential alignment (how speakers coordinate references across participants and moments).

In practice: When processing text or dialogue, refereri markers help distinguish between multiple potential referents and reduce ambiguity. In computational linguistics, refereri-informed coreference resolution can improve accuracy in multilingual corpora, particularly where pronoun use is sparse or inconsistent.

Example: In a scene with two characters, Maria and Lee, a refereri approach would assign distinct anchors to Maria and Lee and track which pronoun or nominal signals refer to each, even if intervening clauses separate the references.

Criticism and reception: Some scholars argue that the framework adds analytical complexity and requires granular annotation, while others praise its explanatory power for accounting of pronoun variation and cross-language data.

See also: referent, anaphora, deixis, coreference.