140 Sylvie De Cock and Diane Goossens
framework of a project that sets out to explore quantity approximation from an
onomasiological perspective using computerised corpora and an inductive cor-
pus-driven approach. The project is also contrastive as it seeks to identify the vari-
ous linguistic devices that can be used to approximate quantities in English, Dutch
and French. The focus of this study is on number approximations, i.e. combina-
tions of approximating devices and numbers denoting quantity (e.g. about $20) in
business news reporting in English and French. The aim of the study is to bring to
light and compare the various linguistic devices that can be used in English and
French to refer to quantities in an imprecise manner in a genre where the expres-
sion of quantity can be regarded as particularly pervasive.
Channell’s seminal book Vague Language (1994) contains a number of chap-
ters devoted to the various possible ways in which quantities can be approximated,
namely by adding lexical material to a number which results in a vague quantity
reading (e.g. around 20,000 feet), by using precise numbers with a vague reading
(e.g. round numbers and plural number nouns like hundreds of) and by using
non-numerical vague quantifiers (e.g. bags of people). Channell’s work seems to
have been based on different types of material including what she calls ‘attested
conversation and written examples’, elicitation and introspective data. Although
some corpus data appears to have been used in the study (some of the examples
given come from the Oxford Corpus of the English Language), it is not thoroughly
described and its role in the description of the phenomenon is unclear.
The book Vague Language has been highly influential and many corpus-based
studies of quantity approximation published after 1994 (e.g. Drave 2002; Jucker et
al. 2003; Cheng 2007; Koester 2007; Ruzaite 2007) concentrate on pre-established
(and often very limited) lists of items based on Channell’s (1994) typology. For
example, Ruzaite (2007) focuses on the approximators about, around, approxi-
mately, roughly and round in corpora of British and American spoken academic
discourse.
A number of empirical studies (Dubois 1987; Hyland 1996; Howard 1998;
Jucker et al. 2003) have attempted to shed light on the discourse functions of quan-
tity approximation and more generally of vague language in spoken or in written
genres like academic writing or oral slide presentations. Kennedy (1987) sets out
to identify what he calls approximation devices by combining manual retrieval
from a small corpus of written English with careful scrutiny of the Concise Oxford
Dictionary (1976) and experimental data (10 native speakers were asked to list
ways of expressing numerical approximation).
Empirical studies of quantity approximation in business-related discourse in
English are rare. The focus of Channell (1990) is on factors that make a writer
choose a precise or a vague quantity. Five categories of vague and precise quan-
tities are analysed (e.g. ‘(apparently) exact quantities’ such as 21 million tons).