Towards a typology of reference chains in administrative and legal texts

In this paper, we present a study of the properties of reference chains in non-narrative texts (public reports, decisions of European Court of Justice). We study reference chains both on human and non-human referents. Our project aims at studying the linguistic properties of referential chains (categories of referential expressions (mentions), the type of the first mention of the chain, length of the chains, and distance between the mentions). We check the hypothesis that the chains referring to non-human entity have a specific way of composition.