Multilingual Reference Annotation: A Case between English and Mandarin Chinese

This paper presents the on-going effort to annotate a cross-lingual corpus on nominal referring expressions in English and Mandarin Chinese. The annotation includes referential forms and referential (information) statuses. We adopt the RefLex annotation scheme (Baumann and Riester, 2012) for the classification of referential statuses. The data focus of this paper is restricted to [the-X] phrases in English (where X stands for any nominal) and their translation equivalents in Mandarin Chinese. The original English and translated Mandarin versions of ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ and ‘The Adventure of Speckled Band’ from the Sherlock Holmes series were annotated. It contains 1090 instances of [the-X] phrases in English. Our study uncovers the following: (i) bare nouns are the most common Mandarin translation for [the-X] phrases in English, followed by demonstrative phrases, with the exception that when the noun phrase refers to locations/places, in such cases, demonstrative phrases are almost never used; (ii) [the-X] phrases in English are more likely to be translated as demonstrative phrases in Mandarin if they have the referential status of ‘given’ (previously mentioned) or ‘given-displaced’(antecedent of an expression occurs earlier than the previous five clauses). In these Mandarin demonstrative phrases, the proximal demonstrative is more often used and it is almost exclusively used for ‘given’ while the distal demonstrative can be used for both ‘given’ and ‘given-displaced’.