referentiestijl

Referentiestijl is a term used in discourse analysis and text linguistics to describe how a speaker or writer selects and handles referents for entities in a discourse. It concerns the strategies for introducing new referents, maintaining and tracking existing referents across sentences, and reintroducing or omitting them as the text develops.

The concept encompasses several mechanisms. It includes the choice between explicit noun phrases, proper nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives; the use of deixis to anchor references in time and place; and the role of cohesion devices such as anaphora and cataphora that link sentences and clauses. A given referentiestijl can affect perceived clarity and coherence: more explicit referential patterns can aid understanding, while compact, pronominal patterns can support fluency in continuous discourse.

In practice, researchers examine referentiestijl to distinguish genres and writing styles (for example, journalism, academic writing, or narrative prose) and to study information structure and audience design. It relates to broader concepts such as cohesion, coherence, and information flow, and to how topics are introduced and developed across a text. Cross-linguistically, referential strategies vary with pronoun systems, syntax, and discourse norms, influencing how writers manage discourse entities.

In computational linguistics and natural language generation, referentiestijl concepts inform models of coreference resolution and text production, helping to simulate how entities are introduced and carried through a text.

See also: anaphora, deixis, cohesion, discourse analysis, information structure.