142 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens
tests. McEnery and Xiao’s (2007) contrastive study centres around quantifying
constructions that do not involve numbers like (a) handful (of ) in written and
spoken corpora of English and Chinese.
The present study combines the use of comparable computerised corpora with
an inductive corpus-driven approach (Section 2) to uncover the various linguistic
devices that can be used to refer to quantities in an imprecise manner in business
news reporting in English and French. In particular, the paper seeks to answer the
following research questions:- Do English and French tend to use imprecision around numbers to the same
extent? (Section 3) - Do the two languages exhibit (dis)similar semantic tendencies when express-
ing quantity approximation in business news reporting? For example, do they
favour approximators expressing a minimum amount (e.g. au moins 30%,
larger than 30 inches) or an amount which is equal to more or less the number
used (e.g. plus ou moins 100£, around 25%)? (Section 4) - Do French and English display (dis)similar preferred grammatical catego-
ries when approximating numbers in business news reporting (e.g. adverbs,
prepositions, verbs, prefixes or suffixes)? (Section 5) - How do combinations of approximators and numbers in the two corpora com-
pare in terms of the preferred company they keep? (Section 6) - Data and method
The corpora used in this study include two 500,000-word comparable corpora
of business news reporting, i.e. corpora consisting of original texts in English
and French sampled using similar design criteria, both compiled at the Centre
for English Corpus Linguistics, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).
The Business English News corpus (henceforth BENews) contains articles pub-
lished between 2006 and 2009 taken not only from the business sections of main-
stream newspapers and magazines including the Times, the Herald Tribune, the
Independent and Time magazine, but also from a newspaper and a magazine
specialised in business matters, viz. the Financial Times and The Economist. The
FREnch business News corpus (henceforth FRENews) is a comparable corpus of
written business news reporting published between 2002 and 2011. Like BENews
it includes articles from the ‘Economie’ sections (i.e. the business sections) of the
non-specialised newspapers and magazines Le Soir, Le Nouvel Obs, Le Monde
Diplomatique and Le Figaro as well as from two specialised publications, namely
Les Echos (a newspaper) and Trends Tendances (a magazine).