referentievaties

Referentievaties is a neologistic term used in theoretical linguistics to refer to the systematic variation of referents within a discourse as a function of context, audience design, and pragmatic intent. The term combines Dutch roots referentie (reference) and variaties (variations), and is typically described as focusing on how referential expressions such as pronouns, definite descriptions, proper names, and demonstratives are chosen and re-assigned across sentences to maintain coherence, signal social relations, or manage information structure.

In practice, referentievaties describes patterns such as a speaker alternating between a person’s name and a pronoun across mentions to foreground identity in the first instance and reduce redundancy later, or shifting from “the manager” to “she” after a private cue becomes relevant. It intersects with theories of deixis, anaphora, and discourse coherence, and has potential applications in natural language processing, such as improving coreference resolution by modeling referent variation across discourse segments, or in translation to preserve referential nuance. The term is relatively new and not yet widely adopted in mainstream linguistics; ongoing work seeks to formalize its typology and to distinguish it from general referential cohesion. Related concepts include reference, coreference, deixis, and discourse analysis.