Quantity approximation in English and French 141
Channell’s data includes three papers written by her colleagues in economics,
whom she later interviews so they can comment on their choices of words or
expressions referring to vague and precise quantities. Cheng (2007) examines the
frequencies of vague items (based on Channell 1994) in an intercultural context in
a variety of genres using computerised corpora of English containing among oth-
ers business language (e.g. meetings, informal office talk). Only about is analysed
for the category of ‘vague additives to numbers’. Another study which makes use
of a corpus of business-related discourse is Koester (2007), who investigates the
frequency and functions of a selection of vague items (also based on Channell’s
1994 typology) in a small corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions in the
offices of various North American and UK organisations. Three types of ‘vague
approximators’ are examined, namely about, around and or so.
Studies of quantity approximation in French are scarce. They tend to be lim-
ited to more theoretical discussions and to a restricted set of items. Adler and
Asnes (2010) have carried out a semantic analysis of the approximator autour de
and have compared its semantic and grammatical properties with the approxima-
tors près de, jusqu’à and au-delà de. The analysis mainly centres around invented
examples. Vaguer’s study (2010), which is based on reference grammars, diction-
aries, a literary corpus and judgment tests, provides a syntactic, distributional and
semantic description of the approximator facilement when used in combination
with a numeral (e.g. On te donnerait facilement dix-huit ans). Mihatsch (2010) uses
corpus data to illustrate the diachronic evolution of the scalarity of a few quantity
approximators including environ and autour de from a cognitive perspective.
As pointed out by Vaguer (2010), there has been no large-scale study of vague
language in French (and hence no study of quantity approximation within the
framework of vague language) that is similar to the work done on vague language
in English (e.g. Channell 1994) or that gives an account of the variety of items
that can be used to express quantity approximation in French based on corpus
evidence. To our knowledge no empirical investigation of quantity approximation
in business-related discourse has been published for French.
Quantity approximation appears to be largely unexplored in contrastive stud-
ies. The few existing contrastive investigations tend to concentrate more on the
types of numbers that are used in approximations than on the actual approximators
that can be used around numbers. Jansen and Pollmann (2001) investigate the use
of round numbers in what they consider to be ‘approximation contexts’ in news-
paper corpora in Dutch, English, German and French. For French and English,
Jansen and Pollmann scrutinise the numbers that are immediately preceded by
environ and about respectively. Eriksson et al. (2010) examine which combinations
of numbers tend to be used in approximating pairs of numbers like two, three years
ago in English and Swedish using spoken corpora and experimental judgment