Quantity approximation in English and French 153
(26) Michael Moran of Goldman Sachs thinks such hits could amount to $200
billion or more over the cycle. (BENews)
(27) Le montant d’une éventuelle aide au Portugal avait été estimé à environ 50
milliards à l’automne. (FRENews) [‘had been estimated at about 50 billion’]
(28) Une décision qui selon le quotidien “devrait détruire 200 à 400 emplois” à
l’usine de Douvrin. (FRENews) [‘would cut 200 to 400 jobs’]
The use of approximators (and markers of epistemic modality) in examples like
these might either mirror the experts’ or companies’ own use of approximating
devices (when they aim to remain rather cautious about their predictions for
example) or they may well be a way for business journalists to distance themselves
from the figures and predictions they are reporting and commenting on.
- Conclusion
Our inductive study of quantity approximation in business news reporting in
English and French has revealed that there are both similarities and differences
between BENews and FRENews in terms of the approximators that are used
around numbers denoting quantities. The approximators uncovered tend to co-
occur with similar items, which either reinforce or specify the approximation or
else reflect the fact that journalists report other people’s figures and estimates.
The semantic analysis has shown that, although the five semantic categories of
approximators identified are represented in both corpora, some are preferred in
either English (e.g. ‘expressing a quantity which is equal to more or less’) or French
(e.g. ‘expressing an interval’). When it comes to the grammatical realisations of
the approximators, while the two corpora share eleven grammatical categories,
some are language-specific (e.g. determiners in English) or favoured in one of
the corpora (e.g. verbs in French), sometimes supporting or running counter to
observations made in the English-French contrastive literature. Further investi-
gation is required to explain one of our major findings, namely that overall there
is less approximation around numbers in the French corpus than in the English
corpus. We suggested that this might be due to a difference in the level of formal-
ity used in business news reporting between the two languages (imprecision tends
to be associated with lower levels of formality) or to a preference for other ways
of encoding quantity approximation in French (using round numbers with vague
reading and/or ways of expressing approximation that do not involve numbers).
The latter possibility will be examined as part of the project within which this
study was carried out. A large-scale empirical contrastive study of formality levels