148 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens
(5) Under the plan, scheduled to run for at least five years, banks will pay a fee to
the government for taking out a policy. (BENews)
(6) Elle a enregistré un bénéfice net part du groupe de 3,43 millions de dollars,
après une perte frôlant les quatre millions de dollars en 2009.
(FRENews) [‘come close to’]
(7) Thirty companies laid off almost 200,000 people in January. (BENews)
(8) Pour les trois mois clos fin juin, le groupe Toyota a vendu entre 1,8 et 1,9 mil-
lion de véhicules, soit environ 30% de plus qu’il y a un an, précise le Nikkei.
(FRENews) [‘between 1.8 and 1.9 million’]
(9) “For a normal trader, a gain of EUR 30,000 to EUR 40,000 was a good day...”
(BENews)
(10) Maintenant, les flux annuels ont atteint 15 ou 20 milliards.
(FRENews) [‘15 or 20 billion’]
(11) GM (GM) is signaling that it may have to take another 15,000 or 20,000 jobs
off its payroll in the next month... (BENews)
Table 5 contrasts the number of approximators (tokens) for each of the five seman-
tic categories identified in the data in the English corpus and in the French cor-
pus. As is clear from (the ranking in) the table, both the preferred and the least
preferred semantic pattern is the same in BENews and FRENews: approximators
expressing a minimum quantity (rank 1) and approximators expressing a quan-
tity that is either n or n (rank 5). Also fairly similar is the proportion and the
ranking of the category ‘expressing a maximum amount’: rank 3 with 21.6% in
the English corpus and rank 2 with 23.3% in the French corpus. By contrast, the
categories ‘expressing a quantity which is equal to more or less the number used’
and ‘expressing an interval’ are used to more markedly different degrees in the two
corpora, thereby pointing to possible language-specific preferences. The propor-
tion of ‘more or less’ patterns is almost twice as high in the English corpus as in
the French corpus (28.7% – rank 2 vs 15.3% – rank 4), while patterns expressing
an interval like ‘X à Y’ and ‘entre X et Y’ represent a considerably higher percent-
age of quantity approximations in the French corpus than in the English corpus
(14.2% vs 5.6%).Table 5. Semantic categories of the approximators identified in BENews and FRENews
Category Rank BENews Rank FRENews
Minimum quantity 1 939 (42.3%) 1 775 (45.4%)
More or less 2 636 (28.7%) 4 261 (15.3%)
Maximum quantity 3 480 (21.6%) 2 398 (23.3%)
Interval 4 125 (5.6%) 3 243 (14.2%)
Either n or n 5 38 (1.7%) 5 30 (1.8%)