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 ...
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Dokumenttyp: | conferenceObject |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2019 |
Schlagwörter: | Quantity approximation / vague language / Dutch / French / English / English for specific purposes |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27152909 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/235486 |
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 language for (business) language students has been highlighted by Koester (2007), its treatment in English reference tools and language textbooks tends to be very limited (De Cock & Goossens 2012). This poster sets out to present a Moodle self-study course that is currently being developed at the Université catholique de Louvain based on Goossens’s (2014) corpus-driven comparative study of quantity approximation in three languages frequently used in the workplace in Belgium, namely Dutch, English and French (e.g. ‘a slew of companies’, ‘up to 25,000 people’; ‘minstens een veertigtal locomotieven’, ‘een slordige 1000 euro’; ‘dépassent allégrement 10%’, ‘pas moins de 125 000 profils’). Findings from the study, which made use of both comparable and translation corpora of (business) news reporting, serve as the starting point for a whole range of activities designed to help students (1) decode and interpret expressions of quantity approximation, (2) extend their linguistic repertoire of linguistic devices expressing quantity approximation (including their typical collocational patterns and any relevant grammatical characteristics), and (3) explore translation equivalents in the three languages. In addition, the activities also provide bite-size and contextualised information about, for example, the various functions of quantity approximation and some of the preferred word classes used to ...