Crosslinguistic Annotation of German and English Shell Noun Complexes

This contribution involves the manual annotation of shell nouns and their antecedents in a multilingual context. Shell nouns are abstract nouns, which like pronouns are semantically incomplete and derive their meanings from other parts of a text to which they refer, often anaphorically. Unlike pronouns, shell nouns also serve to characterize the content to which they refer. The annotation schema we introduce allows for the annotation of shell nouns along with their content and their translation in a parallel text. This approach should enable the production of data on shell nouns which encompasses various aspects of their behavior that have not yet been investigated in detail, including the use of multiple content phrases, nominalized content phrases, plural shell nouns or crosslinguistic behavior.