Coreference

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In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did, the words Alice and she refer to the same person.^[1]

Co-reference is often non-trivial to determine. For example, in Bill said he would come, the word he may or may not refer to Bill. Determining which expressions are coreferences is an important part of analyzing or understanding the meaning, and often requires information from the context, real-world knowledge, such as tendencies of some names to be associated with particular species ("Rover"), kinds of artifacts ("Titanic"), grammatical genders, or other properties.

Linguists commonly use indices to notate coreference, as in Bill_i said he_i would come. Such expressions are said to be coindexed, indicating that they should be interpreted as coreferential.

When expressions are coreferential, the first to occur is often a full or descriptive form (for example, an entire personal name, perhaps with a title and role), while later occurrences use shorter forms (for example, just a given name, surname, or pronoun). The earlier occurrence is known as the antecedent and the other is called a proform, anaphor, or reference. However, pronouns can sometimes refer forward, as in "When she arrived home, Alice went to sleep." In such cases, the coreference is called cataphoric rather than anaphoric.

Coreference is important for binding phenomena in the field of syntax. The theory of binding explores the syntactic relationship that exists between coreferential expressions in sentences and texts.