Quantification in conference talks and proceedings articles in engineering

•Comparison of quantification in engineering conference talks and proceedings articles.•Numbers are less frequent, less complex, more approximate in spoken commentaries.•Complex numerical information is communicated visually in the talks.•Preference for quantification by determiners in talks and by lexis in the articles.•Evaluative/interpersonal role of speaker: to adapt numerical data to audience.

The quantification of phenomena and processes is a core activity in science and engineering and is therefore a prominent feature in the spoken and written research genres of hard sciences. The present study proposes a multimodal and genre-based analysis of a corpus of video filmed conference presentations and the corresponding Proceedings articles in hydraulics engineering in order to determine how measurable information is managed by the speakers and authors. The linguistic aspects considered are quantification by numbers, both precise and imprecise, and non-numerical quantification by quantifying determiners and the lexis of measurement. The analysis also covers the contribution of the visual mode to quantification and its interaction with the spoken commentary in the conference presentations. Results show that the way in which quantifiable data are handled in academic speech and writing is very different: numbers are less frequent in the talks, much less complex, and more often accompanied by approximators; quantification by determiners is preferred to lexical quantification. The complex numerical data omitted in the commentaries can be accessed however via the visuals. It is argued that the speaker's role is to accommodate the presentation of quantities to suit his communicative purpose and to facilitate cognitive processing by the audience, fulfilling an evaluative and interpersonal function.