Quantity approximation in English and French 149
- Grammatical categories in BENews and FRENews
As Table 6 shows, the approximators uncovered around numbers in our two cor-
pora belong to a wide variety of grammatical categories: 16 in BENews and 12 in
FRENews, with 11 categories in common. The top three categories are shared:
adverbs (37.9% of the tokens in BENews and 16.6% in FRENews.), ‘PLUS/MOINS
de’ / ‘MORE/LESS than’ (20.9% of the tokens in BENews and 27.3 in FRENews),
and prepositions (17.4% of the tokens in BENews and 32.2% in FRENews.). The
ranking (tokens) of the first and third category is reversed, however: the list in
BENews is topped by adverbs while that in FRENews is headed by prepositions.
The top three categories partly support Carter and McCarthy’s general statement
(2006: 203) that “adverbs and prepositions are most commonly used to express
approximation.” Beside the top three categories, a wide range of other categories of
approximators are represented in our corpora including among others inflectional
and/or derivational suffixes, verbs, determiners, noun or adjective phrases, combi-
nations involving a coordinating conjunction or punctuation marks (see Table 7 in
the Appendix for examples). Particularly noteworthy are well-represented catego-
ries that can be found in one corpus only (underlined in Table 6) or that appear to
be preferred in one of the two corpora.
Approximators realised as determiners occur only in the English corpus (92
tokens and 2 types):
(12) ...government guarantees of some £100 billion... (BENews)
(13) The family agreed in 1999 to take a half share in the company for a cash injec-
tion of several million pounds. (BENews)
Only the French corpus features approximators that combine both derivational
and inflectional suffixes (82 tokens and 2 types) as in:
(14) “Il s’agira de centaines de milliards (d’euros)”, a prévenu Nout Wellink, pré-
sident du Comité de Bâle... (FRENews) [‘hundreds’]
(15) La Chine est-elle pour autant responsable de la destruction de milliers
d’emplois en Occident? (FRENews) [‘thousands’]
Some language-specific tendencies emerge when derivational and inflectional phe-
nomena are examined more closely. Approximators that exhibit derivation account
for 11.6% of all the approximator tokens in the French corpus (198 tokens),^1 while
they represent a mere 0.5% in the English corpus (12 tokens) despite the presence
- This figure includes the number of tokens for the categories ‘derivational suffix’ and ‘deriva-
tional suffix + inflectional suffix’.