persistieseis

Persistieseis is a theoretical construct in linguistics describing the sustained referential persistence of discourse entities across sentences and clauses, enabling cohesion beyond immediate salience. The term blends Latin persistere “to endure” with a Greek-derived nominal suffix. It was proposed in speculative linguistic literature in the early 2020s by Dr. Liora Mendes as a label for the phenomenon by which topics or referents continue to be anchored in discourse even when explicit mentions wane, helping listeners or readers track continuity.

Persistieseis differs from standard anaphora in that it emphasizes the enduring mental representation of a referent across larger stretches of discourse, potentially through indexing, topical cues, and discourse markers, rather than through surface pronouns alone. The concept is used to account for long-range cohesion in narratives and expository texts, where readers infer persistence of topics from prior mentions, repeated lexical fields, or structural cues.

In practice, persistieseis has potential applications in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and natural language processing, particularly for improving coreference resolution and topic-tracking algorithms. It also figures in second-language instruction about how native-like cohesion is achieved in extended discourse.

The concept remains debated, with critics arguing for clearer operational definitions and empirical validation, and some scholars preferring to subsume the idea under existing notions of cohesion and reference. As of now, persistieseis is a hypothetical construct with limited empirical support but ongoing discussion in theoretical circles.