Abstract
Discourse is a representation of reality to be shared with others but there are times when such a representation fails to provide an accurate evaluation of it. That is typically the case with quantitative numerical assignment, either because the speaker is (temporarily) unable to come up with an adequate evaluation or because he does not wish to do so. The result of the tension between fuzziness and precision in spontaneous spoken discourse is a grammar of numerical approximation forms which combine the scanning of quantity and of its representation. Whether it be with juxtaposition, coordination, adverb/suffix insertion or more elaborate forms, the surface of discourse displays a series of structures that bring us back to the cultural and cognitive basis for numerical representation, while unveiling the complexity of our relationship to numbers. All data come from the London Lund corpus of spoken English.
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