Ebook: Coreference in English and German : A Theoretical Framework and Its Application in a Study of Court Decisions

Studying coreference is essential for investigating how texts are produced and understood. While several authors have analyzed coreference in English or in German, there exist so far only few contrastive studies of coreference in these two languages. This book contributes to closing this gap by providing an in-depth study of coreference in English and German in general and in English and German court decisions in particular.The first part of this book presents a new framework of the linguistic devices for coreference in English and German, their functions and the factors which influence their use. This framework is then put to the test in a corpus study of British and German court decisions. The linguistic features of court decisions have been shown to be relatively strongly influenced by the legal system(s) and the legal culture(s) of their country of origin. It was therefore particularly interesting to analyze how these genre-related extralinguistic factors may influence the choice of devices for coreference in court decisions.