Nominal Expressions in Multilingual Corpora: Definites and Demonstratives

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a multilingual corpus study on definite descriptions and demonstrative noun phrases. The analysis made on a parallel corpus (French and Portuguese) reinforces previous findings regarding the predominance of non-anaphoric uses of definite descriptions in English corpus. It is also shown that the use of demonstrative noun phrases, on the other hand, is more regularly based on discourse salient entities. The analysis involves syntactic issues and is oriented to the design of natural language processing tools.

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