Quantifiers in a Spanish and German Comparable Corpus: A Contrastive Study of Economic Texts in On-line Media

摘要

This paper explores the use of quantifiers in economic texts in a comparable German-Spanish corpus. First, previous quantification studies were reviewed in order to acquire a valid classification for quantifiers in both languages. Secondly, we compiled a comparable corpus of sixty specialized on-line newspaper articles (CrisCorp). This study also falls within the studies with ‘concurrent corpora’, as the assembled texts were written on the same date and are dealing with the same topic, the international financial crisis. Finally, we compared our tagged quantifiers and found quantitative and qualitative differences in our data and concerning partitives, comparisons, abbreviations, composition, vagueness and gradation.