Quantity approximation in English
and French business news reporting
More or less the same?
Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens*
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
This paper examines and compares quantity approximation in English and
French business news reporting using two comparable 500,000-word corpora.
The method used to identify quantity approximation is inductive and involves
the scrutiny of concordances of numbers automatically retrieved from a part-of-
speech tagged version of the corpora. The contrastive study of quantity approxi-
mators co-occurring with numbers reveals some similarities and differences
between English and French when it comes to the company the approximators
tend to keep and the semantic and grammatical categories they represent. The
analysis shows that overall there is less approximation around numbers in the
French corpus than in the English corpus.
Keywords: quantity approximation, onomasiological approach, corpus-driven
approach, business news reporting, comparable corpora, English and French
- Introduction
Quantity is one of the basic notions of human existence on a par with time and
place. A variety of linguistic devices can be used to express quantity including,
among others numbers, so-called quantifiers (e.g. many) and nouns (e.g. loads).
The expression of quantity can be precise, as in there were 23 people at the party
last night, or marked by imprecision or vagueness, as in there were about 20 people
at the party last night. The study reported on here was carried out within the
- Diane Goossens acknowledges the support of the Fonds Spécial de Recherche (FSR,
Université catholique de Louvain), which funds the research project within which she is cur-
rently completing her PhD thesis.
