Quantification and the Use of English: A Case Study of One Aspect of the Learner's Task

Abstract

This study explores ways of defining one aspect of the formal content of English language learning and teaching in the context of the semantic framework of quantification. Analysis of a small corpus of written English from journalistic and academic sources identified 14 subcategories of quantification which accounted for over 14 per cent of the words in the corpus. Nonspecific quantification was more than twice as frequent as specific. One particular subcategory, approximation, was explored in greater detail. A comparison of three different ways of identifying how approximation is expressed produced a total of 117 different linguistic devices. The relative frequencies of these types were then established in the ‘learned’ sections of the Brown and LOB corpora. It is suggested that the information which the study provides on an important semantic category and on the linguistic devices which express this category can be used for more informed language-teaching materials development.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.