Abstract pronominal anaphors and label nouns in German and English: Selected case studies and quantitative investigations

Abstract anaphors refer to abstract referents, such as facts or events. This paper presents a corpus-based comparative study of German and English abstract
anaphors. Parallel bi-directional texts from the Europarl Corpus were annotated
with functional and morpho-syntactic information, focusing on the pronouns ‘it’,
‘this’, and ‘that’, as well as demonstrative noun phrases headed by “label nouns”,
such as ‘this event’, ‘that issue’, etc., and their German counterparts. We induce
information about the cross-linguistic realization of abstract anaphors from the
parallel texts. The contrastive findings are then controlled for translation-specific
characteristics by examination of the differences between the original text and the
translated text in each of the languages. In selected case studies, we investigate in
detail “translation mismatches”, including changes in grammatical category (from
pronouns to full noun phrases, and vice versa), grammatical function, or clausal
position, addition or omission of modifying adjectives, changes in the lexical realization of head nouns, and transpositions of the demonstrative determiner. In
some of these cases, the specificity of the abstract noun phrase is altered by the
translation process.