150 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens
of an approximating derivational prefix in BENews only (another multibillion-
pound bailout). Our findings can therefore be seen to lend support to Chuquet
and Paillard’s (1987) observation that French tends to be more derivational than
English. On the other hand, the use of the inflectional suffix appears to be pre-
ferred in the English corpus (10.9% of the approximator tokens in BENews vs
6.5% in FRENews).^2
French displays a greater tendency to use approximating verbs like approcher
(‘to approach’), avoisiner (‘to be close to’), dépasser (‘to exceed’), excéder (‘to
exceed’), flirter avec (‘to hover around’) or frôler (‘to come close to’) than English
(Examples 16 and 17). This is reflected in the number of tokens and types: 6.1%
of all approximator tokens in FRENews (105 tokens; 9 types) vs 1.1% in BENews
(26 tokens; 4 types). This preference appears to run counter to the classic charac-
terisation of French as more nominal and English more verbal (Van Hoof 1989).
(16) 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) [‘coming close to four billion dollars’]- The percentage given for FRENews includes both ‘derivational suffix + inflectional suffix’
and ‘inflectional suffix’.
Table 6. Grammatical categories of the approximators uncovered
in BENews and FRENews
Rank BENews (to, ty) FRENews (to, ty)
1 adverb (841, 10) preposition (550, 14)
2 MORE/LESS than (465, 3) PLUS/MOINS de (467, 2)
3 preposition (388, 10) adverb (284, 13)
4 inflectional suffix (242, 1) derivational suffix (116, 2)
5 determiner (92, 2) verb (105, 9)
6 coordinating conjunction + adverb
(40, 3)derivational suffix + inflectional suffix
(82, 2)
7 coordinating conjunction (38, 1) coordinating conjunction (30, 1)
8 adjective phrase (27, 3) inflectional suffix (29, 1)
9 verb (26, 4) adjective phrase (20, 3)
10 punctuation mark (24, 1) noun phrase (10, 4)
11 number noun (13, 1) coordinating conjunction + adverb (9, 2)
12 derivational prefix (11, 1) punctuation mark (5, 1)
13 comparative adjective + than (5, 3)
14 noun phrase (4, 1)
15 derivational suffix (1, 1)
16 coordinating conjunction +
comparative adjective (1, 1)