Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

144 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens

Table 1. Proportion of numbers denoting quantities that occur

with an approximator in BENews and FRENews

BENews FRENews

Numbers denoting quantities (tokens) 10,432 13,906

Numbers denoting quantities that occur

with an approximator (tokens) 2,218 1,707

Proportion 21.3% 12.3%

The figures included in Table 2 show that, in spite of a significant difference in the

number of tokens, the number of types of approximators is fairly similar in the

two corpora: 46 types in BENews and 54 types in FRENews. As a result, FRENews

exhibits a higher type/token ratio than the English corpus, which suggests that

the approximators used in BENews tend to be used more repeatedly than those

in FRENews.

Table 2. Approximators occurring with numbers in BENews and FRENews:

number of types and tokens and type/token ratio

Approximators BENews FRENews

Types 46 54

Tokens 2,218 1,707

Type/token ratio 2.07 3.16

One possible explanation for the greater number of tokens of combinations of

approximators and numbers in BENews is that quantity approximation involving

numbers may be expressed differently in the French corpus. FRENews may well

include more instances of round numbers with vague reading that do not co-occur

with any approximator (henceforth referred to as non-approximated round num-

bers; e.g. 10,000 people) than BENews. Verifying whether this is indeed the case is

not straightforward, however. Round numbers with vague reading are notoriously

difficult to investigate (e.g. Jansen and Pollmann 2001) because it is very challeng-

ing to determine for certain whether a number like one hundred is actually used

with precise or with vague reading. As it was not possible for us to contact the

journalists who wrote the articles included in the corpora to ask them if they used

round numbers with vague or with precise reading, our investigation of round

numbers is in fact an analysis of round numbers with potentially vague reading

(also referred to as potential round numbers in this paper). As a consequence, our

analysis can only give an indication of the possible more frequent use of round

numbers with vague reading in FRENews. Following previous studies on round

numbers with vague reading (Dehaene and Mehler 1992; Jansen and Pollmann

2001), we labelled as ‘potential round numbers’ those numbers that are multiples