Number Soup: Case Studies of Quantitatively Dense News

Barchas‐Lichtenstein, Jena; Voiklis, John; Attaway, Bennett; Santhanam, Laura; Parson, Patti; Thomas, Uduak Grace; Isaacs-Thomas, Isabella; Ishwar, Shivani; Fraser, John

doi:10.1080/17512786.2022.2099954

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Other studies have exclusively investigated cardinal numbers, finding that English news texts are quantitatively dense (e.g., Cushion, Lewis, & Callaghan, 2017; Maier, 2002). It is possible that news texts use numbers for their purported ability to boost perceived objectivity (Barchas‐Lichtenstein et al., 2022; Porter, 1995) and credibility (Koetsenruijter, 2011). Exploring the distribution of number types across registers (e.g., academic writing, fiction writing) can tell us what types of numerical information (e.g., quantitative, non‐quantitative) are relevant in different communicative contexts with different goals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Woodin,

Winter

2024

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies in support of claims about numerical cognition and mathematical cognition hinge on the assumption that most numbers analyzed are cardinal. This paper is the first to investigate the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis of morphologically unmarked numbers (not, e.g., “eighth” or “21st”) in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Overall, cardinals are dominant—both pure cardinals (sets) and measurements (scales)—except in the range 1,000–10,000, which is dominated by ordinal years, like 1996 and 2004. Ordinals occur less often overall, and nominals even less so. Only for cardinals do round numbers, associated with approximation, dominate overall and increase with magnitude. In comparison with other registers, academic writing contains a lower proportion of measurements as well as a higher proportion of ordinals and, to some extent, nominals. In writing, pure cardinals and measurements are usually represented as number words, but measurements—especially larger, unround ones—are more likely to be numerals. Ordinals and nominals are mostly represented as numerals. Altogether, this paper reveals how numbers are used in American English, establishing an initial baseline for any analyses of number frequencies and shedding new light on the cognitive and psychological study of number.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Woodin,

Winter

2024

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English

Woodin

Winter

Littlemore

et al. 2023

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes patterns of number use in spoken and written English and the main factors that contribute to these patterns. We analysed more than 1.7 million occurrences of numbers between 0 and a billion in the British National Corpus, including conversational speech, presentational speech (e.g., lectures, interviews), imaginative writing (e.g., fiction), and informative writing (e.g., academic books). We find that four main factors affect number frequency: (1) Magnitude – smaller numbers are more frequent than larger numbers; (2) Roundness – round numbers are more frequent than unround numbers of a comparable magnitude, and some round numbers are more frequent than others; (3) Cultural salience – culturally salient numbers (e.g., recent years) are more frequent than non-salient numbers; and (4) Register – more informational texts contain more numbers (in writing), types of numbers, decimals, and larger numbers than less informational texts. In writing, we find that the numbers 1–9 are mostly represented by number words (e.g., ‘three’), 10–999,999 are mostly represented by numerals (e.g., ‘14’), and 1 million–1 billion are mostly represented by a mix of numerals and number words (e.g., ‘8 million’). Altogether, this study builds a detailed profile of number use in spoken and written English.

show abstract

Number Soup: Case Studies of Quantitatively Dense News

Cited by 2 publications

References 50 publications

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About