What is "coreference"

n. (context grammar English) The relationship between multiple terms that have a common referent

n. the grammatical relation between two words that have a common referent

In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions in a text refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent, e.g. Bill said he would come; the proper noun Bill and the pronoun he refer to the same person, namely to Bill. Coreference is the main concept underlying binding phenomena in the field of syntax. The theory of binding explores the syntactic relationship that exists between coreferential expressions in sentences and texts. When two expressions are coreferential, the one is usually a full form (the antecedent) and the other is an abbreviated form (a proform or anaphor). Linguists use indices to show coreference, as with the i index in the example Bill said he would come. The two expressions with the same reference are coindexed, hence in this example Bill and he are coindexed, indicating that they should be interpreted as coreferential.