Forms of Anaphoric Reference to Organisational Named Entities: Hoping to widen appeal, they diversified

Christian Hardmeier, Luca Bevacqua, Sharid Loáiciga, Hannah Rohde

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapterArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Proper names of organisations are a special case of collective nouns. Their meaning can be conceptualised as a collective unit or as a plurality of persons, allowing for different morphological marking of anaphoric pronouns. This paper explores the variability of references to organisation names with 1) a corpus analysis and 2) two crowd-sourced story continuation experiments. The first shows that the preference for singular vs. plural conceptualisation is dependent on the level of formality of a text. In the second, we observe a strong preference for the plural they otherwise typical of informal speech. Using edited corpus data instead of constructed sentences as stimuli reduces this preference.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Seventh Named Entities Workshop
Number of pages5
Publication date20 Jul 2018
ISBN (Print)978-1-948087-37-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Jul 2018
Externally publishedYes

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