Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting
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Sylvie De Cock
Abstract
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.
Abstract
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.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- In memory of Stig Johansson v
- Table of contents vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 7
- Seeing the lexical profile of Swedish through multilingual corpora 25
- A corpus-based analysis of English affixal negation translated into Spanish 57
- English adverbs of essence and their equivalents in Dutch and French 83
- A parallel corpus approach to investigating semantic change 103
- Youngspeak 127
- Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting 139
- Enriching the phraseological coverage of high-frequency adverbs in English-French bilingual dictionaries 157
- Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences 177
- Cohesive substitution in English and German 201
- The extraposition of clausal subjects in English and Swedish 233
- Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 261
- Author index 287
- Subject index 291
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- In memory of Stig Johansson v
- Table of contents vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 7
- Seeing the lexical profile of Swedish through multilingual corpora 25
- A corpus-based analysis of English affixal negation translated into Spanish 57
- English adverbs of essence and their equivalents in Dutch and French 83
- A parallel corpus approach to investigating semantic change 103
- Youngspeak 127
- Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting 139
- Enriching the phraseological coverage of high-frequency adverbs in English-French bilingual dictionaries 157
- Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences 177
- Cohesive substitution in English and German 201
- The extraposition of clausal subjects in English and Swedish 233
- Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 261
- Author index 287
- Subject index 291
