Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting

This paper examines and compares quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting using two comparable 500,000-word corpora. The method used to identify quantity approximation is inductive and involves the scrutiny of concordances of numbers automatically retrieved from a part-of-speech tagged version of the corpora. The contrastive study of quantity expressions co-occurring with numbers reveals some similarities and differences between English and French when it comes to the company the approximators tend to keep and the semantic and grammatical categories they represent. The analysis shows that overall there is less approximation around numbers in the French corpus than in the English corpus.