A Comparison of Quantity Expressions in English and French News Reports

The present study aimed to compare the quantity expressions used in newspapers in English and in French. Four research questions were addressed in this work to uncover whether the English news reports or the French news reports in the corpus included more verbal expressions of quantity and negative verbal expressions of quantity. The results of the research show that, overall, the English corpus uses verbal expressions of quantity to a more significant extent than the French corpus. The study also compared numerical and combinations of numerical and verbal expressions of quantity in the corpora. Most of the results are arguably in line with the findings of De Cock and Goossens (2013). The study has not found enough evidence to uncover whether the English corpus or the French corpus use negative expressions of quantity to a more considerable extent.