**Title**: Active Inference Linguistics: Self-Modeling, Rehearsing Identity, Haecceity, and Referencing Reference **Abstract**: Referents can be understood as (shared) models encoding possibilities. All (linguistic, logical, etc.) referents are inherently ambiguous, and require context for concretization, else they remain unactualized plans/imaginations/memories. Simple referents with relatively “easily” concretizable possibility spaces (“cat”) are less computationally challenging than complex ones (“negation,” or: the concept of reference itself). We examine the predictive challenge agents encounter in self-referential “loops”: when reference “models” reference itself. What predictive function does self-reference serve? Is it a foundational feature of self-modeling, or a side-effect hereof?  The proposal we begin from is that basic self-reference is a prerequisite for selfhood, where selfhood emerges through the surveilling and synthesizing of one’s own information-processing. The loop hereby created is sustained by agents first modelling themselves as agents to effectively act upon their environment. Maintaining this recursive process sustains the experience of continuity through memory and planning (which are not symmetrical, but intertwined). We conceptualize this continuity as predictive rehearsal: the remembering-planning and recursive updating of simulated experience. For all cognitive systems, lived experience necessarily involves the continuous rehearsal of self-predictions, but also the permanent updating hereof.  We propose that a self-model which is capable of reference (has linguistic/communicative capacities) updates its predictive self-referential tension with itself, and this effect is mirrored in the larger communicative landscape through other processes of self-reference. What is also set under speculative investigation here is the concept of self-reference as haecceity: most linguistic/communicative phenomena are representable as referents within shared generative models, but reference itself—the substrate enabling linguistic modeling—cannot be modeled as a referent within its own system, much like the self remains (computationally) intransparent to itself, and can therefore be understood as the ultimate representation of thisness or individuation. This has implications for understanding metacognitive prediction limits and the emergence of perspective/selfhood in active-inferential agents. Date and time TBA.