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# 35. Reference and coreference

**On this page**

1. [1. Referring expressions in French](#1-referring-expressions-in-french)
2. [2. Givenness, accessibility and the reference chain](#2-givenness-accessibility-and-the-reference-chain)
3. [3. Kinds of anaphora](#3-kinds-of-anaphora)
4. [4. Non-referring and generic uses](#4-non-referring-and-generic-uses)
5. [5. Binding: *se*, *soi*, *lui-même*](#5-binding-se-soi-lui-même)
6. [6. Reference in reported speech and dialogue](#6-reference-in-reported-speech-and-dialogue)
7. [7. French coreference corpora](#7-french-coreference-corpora)
8. [8. What the research has found](#8-what-the-research-has-found)
9. [9. Counts in the treebanks](#9-counts-in-the-treebanks)
10. [How Mova handles it](#how-mova-handles-it)
11. [Sources](#sources)

A French speaker who wants to talk about a person, a thing or an event chooses among names, full noun phrases, demonstrative phrases, clitic pronouns bound to the verb, strong pronouns, the pronominal adverbs *y* and *en*, the neuter *ce*, *ça*, *cela* and *le*, and, in a few places, nothing at all. The choice tells the hearer how easy the referent is to find. This chapter describes the French system of referring expressions and the way it differs from the English one (chapter [35 of the English manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/)): grammatical gender on every pronoun of the third person, clitics that cannot stand alone, dislocation with a resumptive clitic, the partitive *en*, the neuter pronouns that take up a whole clause, and a subject that cannot be dropped. It then gives the kinds of anaphora, the non-referring and generic uses, binding, reference in reported speech, the French coreference corpora and what research on them has found, the counts in the UD 2.18 French treebanks and in the CorefUD conversion of Democrat (all made on 2026-11-06), and what Mova does with French reference today, which is little.

Contents

1. [Referring expressions in French](#1-referring-expressions-in-french)
2. [Givenness, accessibility and the reference chain](#2-givenness-accessibility-and-the-reference-chain)
3. [Kinds of anaphora](#3-kinds-of-anaphora)
4. [Non-referring and generic uses](#4-non-referring-and-generic-uses)
5. [Binding: *se*, *soi*, *lui-même*](#5-binding-se-soi-lui-m%C3%AAme)
6. [Reference in reported speech and dialogue](#6-reference-in-reported-speech-and-dialogue)
7. [French coreference corpora](#7-french-coreference-corpora)
8. [What the research has found](#8-what-the-research-has-found)
9. [Counts in the treebanks](#9-counts-in-the-treebanks)
10. [How Mova handles it](#how-mova-handles-it)

---

## 1. Referring expressions in French

| form | example | UD shape (GSD) | typical use |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| proper name | *Platon*, *la Seine* | PROPN, `flat:name` for multiword names | introduce or re-identify a known individual |
| definite NP | *le chat*, *la porte de la maison* | `det` *le/la/les* (`Definite=Def`) + NOUN | a referent the hearer can identify: mentioned, visible, unique or inferable |
| indefinite NP | *un chat*, *des amis*, *du pain* | `det` *un/une/des*, partitive *du/de la* | a new or non-specific referent |
| demonstrative NP | *ce chat*, *cet animal*, *cette idée-là* | `det` *ce/cet/cette/ces* (`PronType=Dem`) | a referent pointed at in the situation or the text; renaming |
| clitic pronoun | *il*, *elle*, *le*, *la*, *lui*, *les*, *leur* | PRON `Emph=No`, `Case=Nom/Acc/Dat` | the referent in focus |
| strong pronoun | *lui*, *elle*, *eux*, *elles*, *moi*, *toi*, *soi* | PRON `Emph=Yes` | contrast, after a preposition, alone, in dislocation |
| pronominal adverb | *y*, *en* | PRON; `obl`, `iobj`, `nmod`, `expl:comp` | a complement with *à* or *de*; a place; a quantity of a type |
| neuter pronoun | *ce*, *ça*, *cela*, *ceci*, *le* (*je le sais*) | PRON `PronType=Dem`; *le* `obj` | a situation, a fact, a clause, a predicate |
| demonstrative pronoun | *celui-ci*, *celle-là*, *ce dernier* | PRON `PronType=Dem`; *ce dernier* = DET + ADJ | re-identification among several candidates |
| possessive | *son livre*, *sa maison*, *le sien* | DET `Poss=Yes`; *le sien* PRON | anchors a referent to a known possessor |
| reflexive | *se*, *soi*, *lui-même* | PRON `Reflex=Yes`; `obj`, `iobj`, `expl:pv`, `expl:pass` | a co-argument of the same predicate (§5) |
| zero | *Pierre boit et ∅ fume*; *Viens !* | no node | a shared subject in coordination; the imperative and the infinitive |

The forms of the personal pronouns, the order of the clitic cluster and the uses of *y* and *en* are in [chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/); the points that matter for reference are these.

**Gender is grammatical.** Every pronoun of the third person singular and plural shows the gender of its antecedent, and the antecedent may be a thing: *La table ? Elle est dans la cuisine*; *Le livre ? Il est sur la table.* French has no neuter personal pronoun corresponding to English *it*: what English splits into *he/she* for people and *it* for things, French splits by the gender of the noun. Agreement in gender and number is therefore a far stronger filter on candidate antecedents than in English, for things as well as for people, and it is the first constraint every French resolver applies (Godbert & Favre 2017, `godbert-2017-detection-de-coreferences-de-bout`; Oberle 2019, `oberle-2019-detection-automatique-de-chaines-de`). Its limits are the epicene nouns (*la victime*, *une personne*, *le professeur* said of a woman), where the pronoun may follow the noun's gender or the person's, and the nouns that change gender between singular and plural use (*gens*).

**Possessives agree with the possessed, not the possessor.** *Son livre* and *sa maison* do not say whether the owner is a man or a woman: *son* and *sa* agree with *livre* and *maison*. *Marie a vu Paul dans sa voiture* leaves open whose car it is. English *his*/*her* gives the resolver a gender cue that French does not; French gives the number of the possessor only (*son* vs *leur*). The CorefUD Democrat data treats possessive determiners as mentions (5 333 mention heads with UPOS `DET`, 7.6% of all mentions, §7), following the French tradition that counts them as referring expressions because they vary in person and number with the possessor (Oberle 2019, citing Charolles 1988 and Schnedecker & Landragin 2014).

**Clitics are not free words.** A clitic cannot be stressed, coordinated or used alone. When a referent must be contrasted, coordinated or put after a preposition, the strong form appears: *Lui, il reste* ("he, for his part, stays"), *Paul et elle*, *avec eux*. With the verbs of the class *penser à*, *tenir à*, *s'habituer à*, a person is taken up by *à* + strong pronoun, not by the dative clitic (*Je pense à elle*, not **Je lui pense*), and a thing by *y* (*J'y pense*) ([chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)). The strong pronoun is thus both a marker of contrast and, with these verbs, the ordinary form.

**Animacy is partly marked.** The dative clitics *lui* and *leur* and the strong pronouns after a preposition are used for people in the standard; *y* and *en* are preferred for things (*J'y pense*, *J'en parle*). Godbert & Favre (2017) turn this into a rule: their system gives *y* and *en* the type inanimate and *lui*, *elle*, *eux*, *elles* in a prepositional or indirect position the type animate, and checks the candidate against it. In speech the boundary is loose (*j'en ai parlé, de Paul* is common), so the rule is a preference, not a constraint.

**The subject is never dropped.** French is not a null-subject language: a finite verb has a noun or a clitic subject, except in the imperative, in the infinitive and in coordination with a shared subject (*Pierre boit et ∅ fume*). Zero anaphora in French is thus limited to the coordination, which Oberle (2019) handles with a rule that copies the subject of the first conjunct, and to a few registers (notes, diaries, telegraphic style: *Suis arrivé hier*, *Faut voir*).

## 2. Givenness, accessibility and the reference chain

### 2.1 The scales

Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski's givenness hierarchy and Ariel's accessibility scale ([English chapter 35](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/), §2) were stated for English, but their logic carries to French: the less information an expression carries, the more accessible the referent it signals. A French version of the accessibility scale, from most to least accessible, is:

| accessibility | French form | note |
| --- | --- | --- |
| highest | zero (coordination, imperative) | only where the grammar allows it |
|  | clitic pronoun *il*, *le*, *lui*, *y*, *en* | unstressable; the default for the topic |
|  | strong pronoun *lui*, *elle*, *eux* | contrast; or forced by the construction (§1) |
|  | *celui-ci*, *ce dernier* | picks the most recent of several candidates (§3.4) |
|  | demonstrative NP *ce chat*, *cet animal* | renaming, often with a hypernym (§3.2) |
|  | definite NP *le chat* |  |
| lowest | full name, name with modifier | first mention, or re-identification after a long gap |

Two French facts shape the scale. First, the clitic and the strong pronoun are two rungs where English has one (unstressed and stressed *he*). Second, French writing avoids repeating a noun more than English does; the school norm teaches the reprise by a synonym, a hypernym or an epithet (*Victor Hugo… le poète… l'auteur des Misérables*), so the rung of demonstrative and definite NPs is crowded with **anaphores infidèles** (§3.2). Oberle (2019) gives this avoidance of repetition as the reason to build lexical resources for them.

### 2.2 The reference chain

The French tradition, from Corblin and Charolles to Schnedecker, studies the **chaîne de référence**: the sequence of all expressions in a text that refer to one entity, together with its shape (how it opens, how often it is renewed by a full NP, where the pronouns cluster). The chain is the object the Democrat project annotated ("Description et modélisation des chaînes de référence", acknowledged in Oberle 2019) and the object that the Scolinter work on children's writing measures as **continuité référentielle** (Barletta 2024, `barletta-2024-annotation-de-la-continuite-referentielle`; Barletta & Ponton 2025, `barletta-2025-analyse-de-la-continuite-referentielle`): whether young writers keep a referent identifiable with pronouns and renewals, or lose it. The chain view differs from the pairwise view of most algorithms (pronoun → antecedent) in that it describes the whole sequence; a long chain in a novel can hold thousands of mentions spread over hundreds of pages (§8).

Boiteau, Mathet & Widlöcher (2025, `boiteau-2025-integration-des-relations-inter-referents`) argue that annotating chains is not enough: the relations between the entities themselves (a group and its members, a whole and its parts, an entity and its later state) form a second level, which they annotate with their own tool, OPERA. Their model is the clearest statement in the open French literature that coreference and bridging belong in one referential model rather than in two separate tasks.

### 2.3 Centering

Centering theory (Grosz, Joshi & Weinstein 1995, `grosz-1995-centering-framework-modeling-local-coherence`) ranks the entities of an utterance, in English by grammatical role. In French the subject clitic is the strongest continuation of the backward-looking centre, and dislocation adds a device English lacks in writing: a left-dislocated noun or strong pronoun announces the topic, and the clitic in the clause continues it (*Mon frère, il est parti*). A *Continue* transition in French writing is typically a clitic subject; a *Shift* is typically a full NP or a dislocation in speech. We have not found an open study that measures centering transitions on a French corpus.

## 3. Kinds of anaphora

### 3.1 Pronominal

The pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number; person is third unless the antecedent is the speaker or the addressee. The clitic chosen depends on the function in the new clause, not in the old one: *J'ai vu Marie. Je lui ai parlé* (the antecedent was a direct object, the pronoun is a dative). The neuter *le* takes up a predicate or a clause rather than a noun: *Elle est heureuse et elle ne l'a pas toujours été*; *Il me l'a dit* (GSD fr-ud-test_00087).

(1) Democrat, CorefUD, `articleswiki_zebre-p1-s1` to `-p2-s3` (from a Wikipedia article, CC BY-SA 4.0): *Zèbre est un nom vernaculaire […] pouvant désigner plusieurs espèces différentes d'herbivores de la famille des équidés […]. Ils se trouvent principalement en Afrique centrale et australe. Ces animaux se caractérisent par des bandes de rayures verticales noires et blanches.*

The annotation links *Ils* to *plusieurs espèces*, and *Ces animaux* to *Zèbre* — two different chains; the next sentence takes the species up again with *ce groupe*. The pronoun *ils* is masculine plural, and the only masculine plural candidates are *herbivores* and *équidés*: the annotators chose *espèces* (feminine) on meaning, against agreement. The same sentence shows the limit of the agreement filter in the other direction: *celle-ci* in *toutes les espèces descendantes de celle-ci* is feminine singular and must take up *une espèce commune*, but the annotation links it to the chain of *les équidés*. A gender-and-number check would flag both links for review; it would also reject the first one, which is defensible. Agreement in French is a strong cue, not an oracle.

### 3.2 Nominal: *anaphore fidèle* and *anaphore infidèle*

The French terms, used in ANCOR and after it, separate a **faithful** reprise, with the same head noun (*le chat… ce chat*; ANCOR calls this a *relation directe*), from an **unfaithful** one, with a different noun: a synonym, a hypernym or an epithet (*Mon chat… cet animal*; *La Seine… ce fleuve*; *Paris… la Ville Lumière*) (Oberle 2019). The unfaithful reprise is frequent in written French and hard for a resolver because it needs lexical knowledge. Oberle builds two resources for it: a hypernym dictionary extracted from the first noun of each gloss of a parsed French Wiktionary (GLÀWI: *chat* → *mammifère* → *animal*, by transitivity), and a list of hypernyms and synonyms for named entities taken from YAGO (*Zidane* → *footballeur*, *sportif*, *athlète*). He notes that the relations depend on the domain: *chat* is an animal in ordinary use and an electronic conversation in computing.

The demonstrative determiner is the usual marker of an unfaithful reprise (*cet animal*, *ce fleuve*), because the demonstrative signals that the referent is already activated and the noun only classifies it. A definite NP with a new noun (*l'animal*) is possible but less explicit. In (1), *Ces animaux* is exactly this: a demonstrative with a hypernym of *zèbre*.

### 3.3 Associative anaphora (bridging)

A definite NP can refer to something not mentioned but inferable from what was: *Nous arrivâmes dans un village. L'église était fermée.* (the church of that village). French linguistics calls this **anaphore associative**; its study in French (Kleiber's work in the 1990s and 2000s) stresses that the relation is stereotypical — a village has a church, a car has a steering wheel — and that the anaphoric NP is definite because the associated object is unique relative to the antecedent. The classes are those of Clark's bridging ([English chapter 35](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/35-reference-and-coreference/), §3.2): parts (*une maison… le toit*), roles (*un procès… le juge*), causes and consequences. The French works of Kleiber are not in the library; this paragraph rests on the general description and the English sources.

How frequent bridging is depends on the genre and on what the annotators chose to mark. In the 100 professional e-mail threads annotated by Guenoune et al. (2020, `guenoune-2020-dataset-anaphora-analysis-french-emails`), association (their name for bridging: any non-identity relation, part-of or "contextual association of ideas") is the second relation after identity: 252 of 1 856 annotated links, against 1 367 identity links; annotators disagreed most on these links. The CorefUD conversion of Democrat has no `Bridge=` marks at all (count of 2026-11-06), so the only French bridging data of size in Mova's reach is not annotated as such.

### 3.4 Demonstrative pronouns: *celui-ci*, *ce dernier*

When two candidates of the same gender and number compete, French writing chooses the most recent with *celui-ci* (*celle-ci*, *ceux-ci*, *celles-ci*) or *ce dernier* (*cette dernière*, *ces derniers*): *Paul a écrit à son frère ; ce dernier ne lui a pas répondu* (the brother, not Paul). A clitic would prefer the subject (Paul); the demonstrative pronoun overrides that preference and points to the last-mentioned. *Celui-là* in the pair *celui-ci… celui-là* traditionally points to the more distant, but this use is literary.

(2) GSD fr-ud-dev_00065: *Il est le fils du Hall of Famer Ricky The Dragon Steamboat, et a été également entrainé par ce dernier.* — *ce dernier* is the father, the last-mentioned man, not the subject *il*. In GSD, *ce dernier* is a DET *ce* plus an ADJ *dernier* that heads the nominal (here `obl:agent`), not a PRON: a resolver that looks for pronouns by UPOS misses it.

(3) Democrat `sarrasine-p151-s1` (Balzac): *- Mon cher, lui dit ce dernier, je suis chargé par notre ambassadeur de t'inviter à venir ce soir chez lui.* — *ce dernier* names the speaker of the quote, and *je* in the quote is the same person (§6).

These forms are written French: GSD has 107 pronominal *ce dernier* (with `dernier` not `amod`) and 117 *celui-ci*, *celle-ci*, *ceux-ci*; the spoken treebanks have almost none (§9).

### 3.5 Abstract anaphora: *ce*, *ça*, *cela*, *le*

The neuter pronouns refer to situations, facts, propositions and stretches of discourse: *Il est parti sans rien dire. Cela m'a surpris.*; *Ça, c'est beau* (Rhapsodie Rhap_D2011-57: *ça, c'est beau, hein.*); *Je le sais*. Guenoune et al. (2020) call this the **synthetic** relation, "a summary of an idea previously described", after Lefeuvre's study of *anaphores résomptives* in *c'*, *cela*, *ça* and *ceci*; it is the third relation in their e-mails (114 links). Godbert & Favre (2017) remove these pronouns from pronoun resolution altogether: their system first finds, from the dependencies, the pronouns of impersonal forms (*il y a*, *il faut*) and those that take up a sentence (*– Louis est arrivé. – Oui, je le sais*), and ignores them in what follows. That is the right first move for a resolver whose mentions are noun phrases: an abstract pronoun has no nominal antecedent and will be linked to a wrong one if it is not kept out.

*Ce* in *c'est* is ambiguous between a referring use (*C'est grand*, said of a thing in view; *Ce sont des amis*) and the expletive subject of a cleft (*C'est lui qui recruta le successeur de Graham*, GSD fr-ud-dev_00665), which UD marks `expl:subj`. In Democrat, *ce* and *cela* are the pronouns most often first mentions of their entity (375 of 428 *ce* heads and 144 of 165 *cela* heads, §7): they open new, abstract entities rather than take up old ones.

### 3.6 *En* and *y*

*En* takes up a phrase with *de*, and in particular **a quantity of a type**: *J'ai trois frères* → *J'en ai trois*; *On en avait vue une dizaine* (GSD fr-ud-dev_00067); *Tsahal a commandé 130 Namers et en a reçu 10* (GSD fr-ud-train_06235). This partitive *en* is not identity coreference: the ten received are part of the 130 ordered, and *en* refers to the kind (Namers), with the numeral giving the new set. It is the French counterpart of English *one*-anaphora and of the partitive *some of them*; in UD GSD it is `nmod` of the numeral or the quantity noun (86 of 282 PRON *en*) or `iobj`/`obj` of the verb. *Y* takes up a place or a complement with *à* (*On y mange correctement*, GSD fr-ud-dev_00087). Both have idiomatic uses that refer to nothing (*il y a*, *s'en aller*, *en vouloir à*, *s'y prendre*), marked `expl:comp` or `fixed` in UD (§4).

### 3.7 Dislocation and the resumptive clitic

In speech, a referent is very often named in a dislocated position and taken up by a clitic in the clause: *Mon frère, il est parti*; *Moi, je pense que…*; *Ce film, je l'ai vu*; *Il est parti, mon frère* (right dislocation). The clitic and the dislocated phrase corefer within one sentence. UD French marks the dislocated phrase `dislocated` (with a subtype in the spoken treebanks: `dislocated:subj`, `dislocated:obj`, `dislocated:mod`, `dislocated:obl`) and the clitic with its ordinary relation.

(4) ParisStories, `ParisStories_2020_maisonAbondonnee_27`: *donc, euh, sa maison, ben, elle avait été abandonnée.* — *sa maison* is `dislocated:subj`, *elle* the subject.

(5) Rhapsodie, `Rhap_D1002-14`: *ça vous dit quelque chose ça ?* — a right-dislocated *ça* that repeats the subject *ça*.

The counts (§9) show how far this is a fact of speech: 354 dislocations in ParisStories (8.3 per 1 000 words) and 250 in Rhapsodie (5.7), against 75 in GSD (0.19) and 17 in Sequoia (0.24). In the spoken treebanks a dislocated subject almost always has a clitic subject on the same head (295 of 302 in ParisStories, 192 of 203 in Rhapsodie); a dislocated object has a clitic object about half the time (14 of 34, 14 of 21). The dislocated element is a strong pronoun in a third of the ParisStories cases (*moi* alone is 78 of 354) and *ça* in a fifth of those of Rhapsodie (56 of 250). For coreference this is the easiest link of all: the tree gives it. Godbert & Favre (2017) use exactly this for cataphora: *Vous pouvez le décrire ce portefeuille* — if the dependencies are right, the pronoun and the dislocated noun have the same governor and the link comes from the tree.

### 3.8 Cataphora

A pronoun can precede its antecedent. In French the common cases are the right dislocation (§3.7: *Il est parti, mon frère*; (5)), a fronted subordinate clause (*Quand il est arrivé, Paul était fatigué*), and the presentational *voici*/*voilà* and *c'est* + clause (*C'est simple : il faut partir*). As in English, a pronoun subject cannot take a noun in its own clause's complement as antecedent (**Il dit que Paul est fatigué*, with *il* = Paul). In Democrat, only 39 entities whose first mention is an *il* exist (of 35 084 entities, §7): cataphora of the third person is rare in written narrative and news.

### 3.9 Split antecedents and groups

*Sophie et Marie sortent ensemble. Elles sont très heureuses* — *elles* refers to the group, which has its own gender and number (feminine plural) (Oberle 2019, who adds rules that build the group as a mention). French agreement with mixed groups is masculine plural (*Paul et Marie… ils*), so a masculine plural pronoun is compatible with any group containing a man, and a feminine plural pronoun with groups of women only. Guenoune et al. (2020) annotate split antecedents instead of building coordinated groups.

## 4. Non-referring and generic uses

| use | example | UD (GSD) | refers? |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| impersonal *il* | *Il pleut*; *Il faut partir*; *Il est important que…* | `expl:subj` | no |
| existential *il y a* | *Il y a douze espèces reconnues* (fr-ud-train_00231) | *il* `expl:subj`, *y* `expl:comp` | no |
| cleft *ce* | *C'est lui qui recruta…* (fr-ud-dev_00665) | `expl:subj` | no |
| idiomatic *en*, *y* | *s'en aller*, *en vouloir à*, *s'y prendre* | `expl:comp`, `fixed` | no |
| inherent reflexive *se* | *se souvenir*, *s'évanouir* | `expl:pv` | no |
| reflexive passive *se* | *Ces livres se vendent bien* | `expl:pass` | no |
| generic *on* | *En France, on mange tard* | `nsubj` | people in general |
| *on* = "we" | *On est parti de nuit* | `nsubj` | the speaker's group |
| generic *tu*, *vous* | *Tu arrives, tu payes, tu entres* | `nsubj` | anyone |
| generic definite | *Le chat est un félin* | `nsubj` | the kind |
| predicative NP | *Elle est avocate* | root with `cop` | a property |
| quantified NP | *chaque élève*, *personne* | `det`, `nsubj` | no fixed referent; binds *son*, *il* |

**Impersonal *il*.** The impersonal subject is far more frequent than English expletive *it* because French has no *there* and builds its existential on *il y a*, its necessity on *il faut*, its weather on *il pleut*, and its extraposition on *il est* + adjective + *de*/*que*. In GSD 611 of 3 612 *il* (16.9%) are `expl:subj`; in the spoken treebanks the share rises to 38.4% in ParisStories (249 of 649) and 57.7% in Rhapsodie (286 of 496), and it is 55.4% in Sequoia (210 of 379), whose parliamentary and medical texts are full of *il convient de*, *il est nécessaire que* (§9). A resolver that treats every *il* as referring will therefore make an error on a sixth to a half of them; this is the French version of the English pleonastic-*it* problem, and larger. In speech the impersonal *il* is often dropped (*faut voir*, *y a pas*), which removes the problem and the token.

**Generic and inclusive *on*.** *On* is "people in general" (*On dit que…*) or, in speech, "we", which has almost replaced *nous* as a subject ([chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)). In ParisStories *on* is 18.3 per 1 000 words against 2.5 for *nous*; in GSD 1.3 against 1.0 (§9). The two readings call for different treatment: generic *on* is not a mention of anyone; "we" *on* corefers with *nous* and with the speaker's earlier *on*. Democrat counts *on* as a mention and starts a new chain with a third of them (314 of 910 heads are first mentions). ANCOR, by contrast, does not link first and second person pronouns, which it treats as deictic (Oberle 2019).

**Generic *tu* and *vous*.** In conversation, *tu* (and *vous* among people who say *vous*) is used for anyone in a described situation: *tu rajoutes un peu de sel, et tu rajoutes la farine* (ParisStories_2019_cuisineApproximative_8, a recipe told to the hearer as a generic "you"). Whether it is the addressee or anyone can only be decided from the discourse.

## 5. Binding: *se*, *soi*, *lui-même*

The reflexive *se* (*s'*) is used for all third persons and for *on*; the first and second persons use *me*, *te*, *nous*, *vous*. A reflexive clitic is bound by the subject of its own clause (principle A); a non-reflexive clitic of the third person is not bound by its clause's subject (principle B): *Paul se lave* (himself) vs *Paul le lave* (someone else). In GSD only a quarter of *se*/*s'* (587 of 2 337) are a true reflexive object (`obj`, *qu'ils se sont consultés*, fr-ud-train_06603) and 72 a dative (`iobj`); the rest are inherent reflexives (`expl:pv`, 986, *Johnson s'appuyait sur*) and reflexive passives or middles (`expl:pass`, 685), which refer to nothing (§9). The distinction is the annotators', not the form's ([chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)).

The strong reflexive *soi* takes an indefinite or generic antecedent (*Chacun pour soi*, *On est bien chez soi*); with a definite antecedent the ordinary strong pronoun is used (*Il pense à lui*), so *lui* after a preposition may be bound by the subject: *Paul ne pense qu'à lui* (himself, or another man). French therefore lets a strong pronoun after a preposition corefer with the subject of its clause, against principle B as it is stated for clitics; *lui-même* removes the ambiguity (*Paul ne pense qu'à lui-même*). The forms in *-même* (*lui-même*, *elle-même*, *soi-même*) also have an intensive use without binding (*l'autorité judiciaire elle-même*, GSD fr-ud-dev_00594). GSD has 104 forms in *-même* and 11 *soi* (§9).

The reciprocal is also *se* (*Ils se parlent*), disambiguated if needed by *l'un l'autre* or *entre eux*.

## 6. Reference in reported speech and dialogue

Inside a direct quotation, *je* is the quoted speaker and *tu*/*vous* the quoted addressee; in the frame, the speaker is often named only after the quote by an inverted verb of saying (*lui dit ce dernier* in (3)). French typography marks direct speech with guillemets « » and, in novels, with a dash (—) at each change of speaker, often without closing guillemets; the speaker of a dash line is found by alternation and by the incises (*dit-il*, *répondit Marie*). Oberle (2019) writes rules for first and second person pronouns and possessives in quotations (*Paul a dit : « Je suis étudiant. »* → *je* = Paul); ANCOR leaves first and second persons unlinked; Democrat links them (2 257 heads *je*/*j'* are mentions). The automatic detection of direct speech in written French, which these rules need, is studied by Durandard et al. (2023, `durandard-2023-automatic-annotation-direct-speech-written`).

The choice of *tu* or *vous* is itself referential evidence: a *vous* addressed to one person picks out a different relation, and a switch from *vous* to *tu* in a dialogue marks the same addressee in a new relation, not a new addressee ([chapter 32](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/32-politeness-and-hedging/)). A *vous* can also be plural, so its number is not known from the form: the verb agrees in the plural either way, and only a predicate adjective or participle shows it (*Vous êtes prête* vs *prêtes*).

In indirect speech the pronouns shift to the reporter's point of view: *Il m'a dit : « Je viendrai »* → *Il m'a dit qu'il viendrait* (*je* → *il*, coreferent with the subject of *dire*). This is the French case of the English pattern in which the subject of a verb of saying is the preferred antecedent of the subject pronoun of its complement clause.

## 7. French coreference corpora

| corpus | what | size | licence |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ANCOR (ANCOR_Centre) | transcribed speech: mostly ESLO interviews, also more interactive dialogue; noun phrases and pronouns with singletons; first and second persons not linked | about 418 000 words (Grobol 2019); 115 672 mentions, 51.1% pronominal (Désoyer et al. 2015, as reported by Godbert & Favre 2017) | CC BY-NC-SA (corpus); its papers are NC |
| Democrat (and its 19th–21st-century subset Dem1921) | written French, diachronic: novels, news (*L'Est républicain*), Wikipedia articles, other texts; chains of reference, possessive determiners as mentions | in CorefUD: see below | CC BY-SA 4.0 (CorefUD conversion) |
| CorefUD French-Democrat | Dem1921 converted to the CorefUD format over automatic UD trees | 96 documents, 11 574 sentences, 256 379 words (counted 2026-11-06) | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| LitBank-fr, Long-LitBank-fr | character mentions in French fiction; three full novels of 285 176 tokens added by Bourgois & Poibeau 2025 | 31 documents, 71 105 character mentions together | open (see the paper) |
| French e-mails (Guenoune et al. 2020) | 100 professional threads, anaphoric links of six types | 1 856 links | freely available for research |
| French Winograd schemas (Amsili & Seminck 2017) | 107 schemas, 214 questions | — | free download |
| French ASR coreference (Milintsevich 2025) | ANCOR material re-transcribed by ASR, annotations transferred | — | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (tests only) |

**The Democrat data in CorefUD.** The conversion is in corefud-fr-democrat (train and dev; the README gives v1.1 of the conversion, 2023-02-24, and CC BY-SA 4.0). Its UD layer (lemmas, tags, features, relations) is automatic, which matters below. Counted on 2026-11-06 over train and dev, mention heads found from the `head` field of `# global.Entity = eid-etype-head-other`:

| measure | value |
| --- | --- |
| documents (train + dev) | 50 + 46 |
| sentences / words | 11 574 / 256 379 |
| mentions | 70 594 (275 per 1 000 words) |
| entities | 35 084 |
| singletons | 28 654 (81.7% of entities) |
| entities with two or more mentions | 6 430, holding 41 940 mentions (6.5 per chain) |
| mention heads: NOUN / PRON / DET / PROPN / other | 37 919 / 19 997 / 5 333 / 4 539 / 2 806 |
| `Bridge=` / `SplitAnte=` | 0 / 0 |
| entity type given | 2 838 of 70 594 mentions (place 1 391, person 1 012, other 279, organization 153) |

The pronoun heads, most frequent first: *il* 2 232 (and *-il* 75), *elle* 2 050 (and *-elle* 124), *je* and *j'* 2 257, relative *qui* 1 551, *lui* 1 040, *nous* 910, *on* 910, *ils* 605, *vous* 568, *l'* 562, *me* 525, *le* 494, *ce* 428 and *c'* 346, *où* 427, *la* 389, *en* 326, *les* 309, *dont* 299, *moi* 285, *cela* 165, *tu* 157. Three facts follow. Relative pronouns are mentions (*qui*, *où*, *dont*, *que*, *lequel*), unlike in GUM. The reflexive *se* almost never is (90 of 1 411 *se* tokens fall inside a mention, and 916 are `expl` in the automatic trees). And about a quarter of *il* are not mentions: 3 054 *il* tokens, 2 232 mention heads, so 822 (27%) are left out — the impersonal *il* of §4. The automatic trees mark only 2 of them `expl`, so a reader of this corpus cannot rely on its UD layer to find the impersonal *il*; the gold UD treebanks mark it (`expl:subj`, 611 in GSD), the parsed Democrat does not.

The chains are mostly pronominal in fiction and nominal in news: Bourgois & Poibeau (2025) find 74.95% pronominal mentions among the character mentions of their three novels, while Guenoune et al. (2020) give 74.8% pronominal anaphors in their e-mails and 41.1% in ANCOR. Democrat as a whole, mixing news, Wikipedia and fiction, has 28.3% pronoun heads among all mentions (including singletons, which are mostly nominal).

## 8. What the research has found

**Rule-based systems.** Godbert & Favre (2017) build an end-to-end French system for pronominal anaphora and faithful nominal reprises: a parser (MACAON), a mention detector trained on ANCOR (F 88.94 on predicted trees), semantic types for nouns and verbs from two lexicons of Dubois & Dubois-Charlier (the DEM and the LVF), and rules on gender, number, semantic class and distance. On the ANCOR test part (23 079 mentions) they report BLANC F 65.7. Their pronoun rules start by setting aside impersonal and sentence-taking pronouns (§3.5) and use the semantic type of the verb a pronoun depends on to choose an antecedent of the right class. Oberle (2019) builds a rule-based end-to-end system for written French that adds the unfaithful reprise (§3.2), groups (§3.9), zero subjects in coordination (§1) and first and second persons in quotes (§6). Evaluated on 3 250 tokens he re-annotated (a literary extract, news items, texts for learners of French), it reaches mention identification F 83.62 and MUC 58.1, B³ 64.53, CEAF 69.28, BLANC 53.08, against 50.2, 36, 31.9, 29.9 and 24.9 for the earlier rule-based RefGen. He concludes that machine learning is better for coreference in general and rules for specific phenomena, and proposes a hybrid.

**Neural systems on speech.** Grobol (2019, `grobol-2019-neural-coreference-resolution-limited-lexical`) adapts the end-to-end neural model of Lee et al. to ANCOR, with explicit mention detection (needed because ANCOR has singletons, which the end-to-end model ignores) and a span context of ten words on each side instead of the whole document, since the far context of transcribed speech is noisy. Mention detection reaches F 85.87; coreference on gold mentions a CoNLL average of 72.0 (against 75.3 for an earlier system that used gold features). Applied to Democrat, the same system does not carry well from spontaneous speech to writing (Grobol 2021, `fr-nlp-2021-grobol-exploitation-corpus-democrat`). Brassier et al. (2018, `brassier-2018-classification-par-paires-de-mention`; 2022, `brassier-2022-valuation-comparative-de-systemes-neuronal`) compare mention-pair classifiers and neural and statistical systems on the interactive part of ANCOR. Milintsevich (2025, `milintsevich-2025-impact-asr-transcriptions-french-spoken`) shows that models trained on human transcripts lose accuracy on automatic transcripts, which have punctuation, capitals, rephrasing and recognition errors; training on silver automatic transcripts as well as gold human ones helps, and models that favour recall degrade less than those that favour precision. Lopez (2023, `lopez-2023-approches-neuronales-pour-la-detection`) review the neural approaches to coreference chains for French.

**Long documents.** Bourgois & Poibeau (2025, `bourgois-2025-elephant-coreference-room-resolving-coreference`) annotate all character mentions of three full French novels from three centuries (285 176 tokens; inter-annotator agreement CoNLL F1 86.36). In their data 95% of pronouns are within seven mentions of their last antecedent, while proper and common nouns may be 270 mentions away, and the last 1% more than 1 700: pronouns, names and nouns need different search windows. Their pipeline (CamemBERT-based mention detection at F1 92–93; a mention-pair scorer with gender, person and distance features) reaches CoNLL F1 72.64 on gold mentions left to right and 74.32 when proper-noun mentions are clustered globally first; performance falls as documents grow, which is why systems trained on short texts disappoint on whole books.

**World knowledge.** The French Winograd schemas (Amsili & Seminck 2017, `amsili-2017-google-proof-collection-french-winograd`) are 107 pairs (214 questions) in which only knowledge of the world decides the antecedent (*Nicolas n'a pas pu porter son fils parce qu'il était trop faible / lourd*). Translating them from English was hard precisely because of gender: a schema works only if both candidates have the same gender and number as the pronoun, and French nouns often do not (*cheveux* is plural, *siphon* singular). Grammatical gender, which helps a resolver everywhere else, has to be neutralised to build a test of reasoning. Seminck, Segonne & Amsili (2019, `seminck-2019-modeles-de-langue-appliques-aux`) test language models on them.

## 9. Counts in the treebanks

Counted on 2026-11-06 from UD_French-{GSD,ParisStories,Rhapsodie,Sequoia}, all splits, syntactic words (multiword tokens counted as their parts), lowercased forms with UPOS `PRON` unless stated. GSD lemmatises *il*, *elle* and *le* as *lui* and *se* as *soi* ([chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)), so the counts are by form, not by lemma.

**Pronouns by type.**

|  | GSD | ParisStories | Rhapsodie | Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| words | 400 385 | 42 789 | 44 234 | 70 545 |
| PRON | 17 687 | 6 375 | 5 280 | 2 741 |
| PRON per 1 000 words | 44.2 | 149.0 | 119.4 | 38.9 |
| `PronType=Prs` | 11 354 | 3 949 | 3 062 | 1 764 |
| `PronType=Dem` | 1 633 | 1 105 | 1 125 | 262 |
| `PronType=Rel` | 3 103 | 345 | 620 | 541 |
| `PronType=Ind` | 1 416 | 902 | 421 | 138 |

Speech has three times as many pronouns per word as writing, and the demonstratives (*ça*, *c'*) are ten times as dense.

**Selected forms.**

| form | GSD | ParisStories | Rhapsodie | Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *il* | 3 612 | 649 | 496 | 379 |
| of which `expl:subj` | 611 (16.9%) | 249 (38.4%) | 286 (57.7%) | 210 (55.4%) |
| *elle* | 957 | 259 | 85 | 91 |
| *ils* / *elles* | 491 / 119 | 102 / 22 | 120 / 15 | 72 / 14 |
| *on* / *nous* | 539 / 383 | 781 / 108 | 301 / 118 | 37 / 181 |
| *ce* + *c'* | 946 | 750 | 719 | 144 |
| *ça* / *cela* / *ceci* | 36 / 142 / 25 | 309 / 2 / 0 | 298 / 13 / 2 | 3 / 51 / 15 |
| *y* / *en* (PRON) | 530 / 282 | 262 / 45 | 258 / 50 | 68 / 47 |
| *celui-ci*, *celle-ci*, *ceux-ci* | 117 | 0 | 0 | 12 |
| pronominal *ce dernier* (ADJ *dernier*, not `amod`, with a demonstrative `det`) | 107 | — | — | 9 |
| forms in *-même* (*lui-même*…) | 104 | 4 | 7 | 8 |
| *soi* | 11 | 5 | 1 | 0 |

*Ça* replaces *cela* almost entirely in speech (309 to 2 in ParisStories), *on* outnumbers *nous* seven to one there, and the written forms of re-identification (*celui-ci*, *ce dernier*) are absent from the spoken treebanks.

***Y* and *en* by relation (GSD).** *y*: `obl` 222, `expl:comp` 154 (*il y a*), `iobj` 114; *en*: `iobj` 112, `nmod` 86 (the partitive with a numeral, §3.6), `expl:comp` 53, `obj` 15, `obl` 13. In the spoken treebanks *y* is mostly the *y* of *il y a*: `expl:comp` 213 of 262 in ParisStories and 202 of 258 in Rhapsodie.

**Expletive and reflexive relations.**

| relation | GSD | ParisStories | Rhapsodie | Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `expl:subj` | 931 | 314 | 425 | 237 |
| `expl:comp` | 211 | 246 | 224 | 44 |
| `expl:pv` | 1 017 | 118 | 74 | 242 |
| `expl:pass` | 686 | 24 | 37 | 57 |

Reflexive *se*/*s'* (`Reflex=Yes`) in GSD: 2 337, of which `expl:pv` 986, `expl:pass` 685, `obj` 587, `iobj` 72; in ParisStories 241: `expl:pv` 91, `obj` 90, `iobj` 33, `expl:pass` 22.

**Dislocation.**

|  | GSD | ParisStories | Rhapsodie | Sequoia |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `dislocated*` | 75 | 354 | 250 | 17 |
| per 1 000 words | 0.19 | 8.27 | 5.65 | 0.24 |
| `dislocated:subj` with a clitic subject on the same head | 18 of 19 | 295 of 302 | 192 of 203 | 0 of 0 |
| `dislocated:obj` with a clitic object on the same head | 3 of 5 | 14 of 34 | 14 of 21 | 0 of 6 |

GSD and Sequoia mostly use the plain `dislocated` (50 and 11); the subtypes are the spoken treebanks'. The dislocated element, by UPOS and pronoun form: in ParisStories NOUN 151, *moi* 78, PROPN 25, *ça* 24, *ce* 15, *lui* 14, *nous* 13; in Rhapsodie NOUN 101, *ça* 56, *moi* 38, *ce* 15, PROPN 14.

## How Mova handles it

**Nothing in Mova resolves French reference.** Checked against the code on 2026-11-06:

- **The `coref` crate** ([coref — SLM coreference: a sieve of rules with a reason for every link](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/)) is a deterministic multi-pass sieve over UD trees, built and measured on English GUM. Its mentions ([`coref/src/mention.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/)) are nominal heads from the tree, excluding `expl`, so on a gold French tree the impersonal *il*, the cleft *ce*, the idiomatic *y*/*en* and the `expl:pv`/`expl:pass` *se* would be kept out correctly. Person and number come from UD FEATS, so a French *il* would get third person singular. But gender and animacy come only from English closed lists: the pronoun table (`pron_table`: *he*, *she*, *it*…), the gendered nouns (`gender_noun`: *mother*, *king*…), the titles (*Mr.*, *Mrs.*), and the gender lexicon of [`coref/src/lexicon.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/), learned from English noun–pronoun paths. The mention reader does not take `Gender` from FEATS. A French *il* and *elle* would both be third-person pronouns of unknown gender, compatible with any noun — the strongest French cue (§1) unused.
- **Pleonastic and event pronouns** ([`coref/src/it.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/)) are recognised by English lemma lists (*rain*, *seem*, *happen*, *true*, *mistake*…). There is no list for *falloir*, *pleuvoir*, *il est* + adjective + *de*, *ça*/*cela* as event pronouns, or *le* taking up a clause.
- **Quotations** ([`coref/src/doc.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/), `mark_quotes`) are found from `"`, `“ ”` and the PTB quote tokens; French guillemets « » and the dialogue dash are not quote marks for it, so the `speaker` sieve would not see French direct speech.
- **The CorefUD reader** ([`coref/src/corefud.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/coref/)) reads `Entity=` brackets with the field order of `# global.Entity`; French-Democrat uses the same header Mova writes (`eid-etype-head-other`) and has no discontinuous mentions (which the reader rejects), so it should be readable. It has not been tried: there is no French coreference measurement in Mova.
- **The frame reader's resolver** ([`prag/src/frames.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/prag/), `ent_at`, `DUMMY_IT`) works on English word forms (*he*, *she*, *it*, *I*, *you*) and English verb lists. It does not read French.
- **The tree.** French is parsed by the English parser after `en xpos-fill` ([README](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)): LAS 87.00 on GSD with its own tags, 89.78 with gold tags (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-10-22). The parser sees forms and PTB tags only (`PRP` for every personal pronoun, no case, no gender, no clitic/strong distinction), and the relations of this chapter (`expl:*`, `dislocated*`, `iobj`) have not been scored separately.

**What is planned.** French pragmatics is being built as a layer for the Eel, the worker that improves Mova's trees and pragmatics: on 2026-11-06 the Eel's schedule has a round kind `prag-fr` (a gated native round, CPU only, that measures a candidate on a pinned French dev sample and installs it only on a gain, with proposals kept for review; [`tools/eel/src/schedule.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/eel/), [`tools/eel/src/native.rs`](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/eel/), on the branch under development). The French tool that the round will run is not written yet, and it has no coreference component. Above the language layers, a language-independent meta-pragmatics — one label schema for reference, acts and relations shared by English, French and the other languages, with each language's forms mapped to it — is the design direction; nothing of it is implemented. For coreference that schema would hold the language-independent part of this chapter (identity, bridging, split antecedent, non-referring, generic, bound) and leave the French part (gender agreement on things, clitic versus strong form, the impersonal *il*, *en* of quantity, dislocation) to the French layer.

**What a French resolver would need**, from the cheapest, built on what exists:

1. Gender from FEATS in `mention.rs` for nouns and pronouns (GSD and Democrat have `Gender` on both), with a French pronoun table: *il/le/lui* masculine singular, *elle/la* feminine, *ils/eux* masculine plural, *elles* feminine plural, *lui*/*leur* dative and animate, *y*/*en* inanimate by preference (Godbert & Favre 2017), *on* and *se* without fixed features.
2. The non-referring uses from the tree (`expl:*`) on gold trees and, on Mova's own trees, from the French impersonal verbs and constructions (*falloir*, *pleuvoir*, *il y a*, *il est* + ADJ + *de*/*que*): §4 shows that a sixth to a half of *il* depend on it.
3. Dislocation links from the tree (§3.7): the clitic and the `dislocated` phrase on one head.
4. *Ce dernier* and *celui-ci* as most-recent-candidate pointers (§3.4), with *ce dernier* found as DET + ADJ.
5. Guillemets and the dialogue dash in `mark_quotes`, and the French verbs of saying in incises (*dit-il*).
6. A first measurement on French-Democrat dev with gold mentions, with the nearest-agreeing-pronoun baseline as the negative control, before any claim.

## Sources

- Godbert, E., Favre, B. 2017. Détection de coréférences de bout en bout en français. TALN. `godbert-2017-detection-de-coreferences-de-bout` (CC BY 4.0).
- Oberle, B. 2019. Détection automatique de chaînes de coréférence pour le français écrit : règles et ressources adaptées au repérage de phénomènes linguistiques spécifiques. TALN-RECITAL. `oberle-2019-detection-automatique-de-chaines-de` (CC BY 4.0).
- Grobol, L. 2019. Neural Coreference Resolution with Limited Lexical Context and Explicit Mention Detection for Oral French. CRAC. `grobol-2019-neural-coreference-resolution-limited-lexical` (CC BY 4.0).
- Grobol, L. 2021. Exploitation du corpus Democrat par apprentissage artificiel. *Langages* 224. `fr-nlp-2021-grobol-exploitation-corpus-democrat` (CC BY 4.0, HAL).
- Brassier, M. et al. 2018; 2022. `brassier-2018-classification-par-paires-de-mention`, `brassier-2022-valuation-comparative-de-systemes-neuronal` (CC BY 4.0).
- Lopez, F. 2023. Approches neuronales pour la détection des chaînes de coréférences : un état de l'art. `lopez-2023-approches-neuronales-pour-la-detection` (CC BY 4.0).
- Milintsevich, K. 2025. Impact of ASR Transcriptions on French Spoken Coreference Resolution. CRAC. `milintsevich-2025-impact-asr-transcriptions-french-spoken` (CC BY 4.0).
- Bourgois, A., Poibeau, T. 2025. The Elephant in the Coreference Room: Resolving Coreference in Full-Length French Fiction Works. CRAC. `bourgois-2025-elephant-coreference-room-resolving-coreference` (CC BY 4.0).
- Guenoune, H. et al. 2020. A Dataset for Anaphora Analysis in French Emails. CRAC. `guenoune-2020-dataset-anaphora-analysis-french-emails` (CC BY 4.0).
- Amsili, P., Seminck, O. 2017. A Google-Proof Collection of French Winograd Schemas. CORBON. `amsili-2017-google-proof-collection-french-winograd` (CC BY 4.0). Seminck, O., Segonne, V., Amsili, P. 2019. `seminck-2019-modeles-de-langue-appliques-aux` (CC BY 4.0).
- Boiteau, A., Mathet, Y., Widlöcher, A. 2025. Intégration des relations inter-référents dans l'annotation de la coréférence. `boiteau-2025-integration-des-relations-inter-referents` (CC BY 4.0).
- Barletta, M. 2024; Barletta, M., Ponton, C. 2025. Continuité référentielle in the Scolinter corpus. `barletta-2024-annotation-de-la-continuite-referentielle`, `barletta-2025-analyse-de-la-continuite-referentielle` (CC BY 4.0).
- Durandard, N. et al. 2023. Automatic Annotation of Direct Speech in Written French Narratives. ACL. `durandard-2023-automatic-annotation-direct-speech-written` (CC BY 4.0).
- Grosz, B. J., Joshi, A. K., Weinstein, S. 1995. Centering. `grosz-1995-centering-framework-modeling-local-coherence`.
- Informing only (non-commercial licences, not quoted): Muzerelle et al. 2013, 2014 on ANCOR (`muzerelle-2013-ancor-first-large-french-speaking`, `muzerelle-2014-ancor-centre-large-free-spoken`); Wilkens et al. 2020 on Dem1921 (`wilkens-2020-french-coreference-spoken-written-language`); Nedoluzhko et al. 2022 on CorefUD (`nedoluzhko-2022-corefud-1-0-coreference-meets`); Désoyer et al. 2014, 2015 on ANCOR.
- Wanted: Kleiber, G. on *anaphore associative*; Corblin, F. 1995, *Les formes de reprise dans le discours*; Charolles, M.; Schnedecker, C. & Landragin, F. 2014 on reference chains.
- Data: CorefUD French-Democrat (v1.1 of the conversion, CC BY-SA 4.0), corefud-fr-democrat; UD 2.18 French GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie (CC BY-SA 4.0), Sequoia (LGPL-LR), ud-treebanks-v2.18. All counts made on 2026-11-06.
- The reference grammars of [Sources](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/sources/) for the descriptive part ([chapter 12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/12-determiners-pronouns-numerals/)).
- [← previous 34. Irony and figurative language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/34-irony-and-figurative-language/)
- [next → 36. Discourse relations and coherence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/36-discourse-relations/)
- [↑ back to Modern Standard French (fr) — a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/)