A slew of activities to explore quantity approximation in Dutch, English and French Introducing the APPROXI_FEN (Français, English, Nederlands) project

Quantity is one of the basic notions of human existence on a par with time and place. The expression of quantity can be precise, as in ‘there were 43 people at the reception yesterday’, or marked by imprecision or vagueness, as in ‘there were about 40 people at the reception yesterday’. As pointed out by McCarthy and Carter (2004) and Goossens (2014), quantity approximation performs several key pragmatic functions in (business and media) discourse (e.g. hyperbolic use, relational functions, distancing function when predicting and estimating quantities). Although the importance of vague... Mehr ...