Quantity approximation in English and French 145
of 10 (i.e. any number ending with a ‘0’ when spelled as a numeral, e.g. 1,000).
Concord in WordSmith Tools (Scott 2008) was used to retrieve any numeral ending
with a ‘0’ (search string: ‘0’, where ‘’ is a wildcard). Concordances for multiples
of 10 spelled out in letters were also retrieved (e.g. ten, cinquante). Numbers that
do not denote quantities (e.g. the year 1990 ) were discarded. Table 3 lists the total
number of potential round numbers in the corpora, the number of potential round
numbers that occur as part of ‘approximator + number’ combinations and the
number of potential round numbers that do not co-occur with an approximator.
As the table shows, there are more non-approximated potential round numbers
in FRENews than BENews (the difference is statistically significant at p < 0.01),
which seems to lend some support to our suggestion that in business news report-
ing French may resort to non-approximated round numbers to express quantity
approximation more frequently than English. That said, if the total figure for
numbers denoting quantities is taken into consideration (cf. Table 1: 10,432 in
BENews and 13,906 in FRENews), the proportion of numbers denoting quanti-
ties that are non-approximated round numbers is actually smaller in FRENews
than in BENews (4,230/13,906 = 30.4% vs 3,947/10,432 = 37.8%), which is in line
with the lower proportion of combinations of approximators and numbers in
FRENews than in BENews observed above. In other words, there appears to be
less approximation with or around numbers denoting quantities in FRENews than
BENews. Investigating the extent to which quantity approximation is expressed
using linguistic items not involving numbers in FRENews and BENews (e.g. a
fairly large number of people; un faible pourcentage d’étudiants) may go some way
towards interpreting the differences observed here but it lies outside the scope of
this article.
Table 3. Round numbers with and without an approximator in BENews and FRENews
BENews FRENews
Potential round numbers 5,408 (100%) 5,559 (100%)
Potential round numbers in ‘approximator +
number’ combinations 1,461 (27.0%) 1,329 (23.9%)
Potential round numbers that do not occur
in ‘approximator + number’ combinations 3,947 (73.0%) 4,230 (76.1%)
It is interesting that a separate study (Goossens 2012) investigating the transla-
tions of six English approximators and six French approximators occurring in
‘approximator + number’ combinations using a bidirectional translation corpus
of general news reporting shows that such combinations are more often translated
using a number without any explicit approximator (e.g. Rolls-Royce has slashed
its workforce (...) to just over 3,000 translated as Rolls-Royce a réduit ses effectifs à