Mapping Referents in Chinese and Italian: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Anaphora, Deixis, and Other Referential Relations

This paper provides an overview of different types of referential expressions, including deixis and anaphora, and explores the various linguistic forms used to encode these relationships in Chinese and Italian – two languages that exhibit distinct reference-tracking systems: the former largely inference-based, the latter primarily morpho-syntactic. To this end, the study examines empirical data from both large and small corpora, spanning a range of genres and text types. The contrastive analysis includes both qualitative and quantitative observations, highlighting similarities and differences, and revealing novel or previously understudied patterns. The results have implications not only from a typological perspective but also for applied fields such as natural language processing and second/foreign language acquisition.