– “MI DIA DUE ZUCCHINE” / – “VANNO BENE 800 GRAMMI?” QUANDO I NUMERI NON CONTANO

The study is devoted to numerical approximations in Russian and Italian, in
particular to the so-called “round” numbers, as main vehicles of semantic vagueness.
Both languages provide for the possibility of a dual cardinal and approximate reading
of numbers. In Russian, a particularly privileged environment for the observation of
round numbers is the approximate inversion of which are investigated the main
mechanisms, the compatibility with certain numbers, the relationship of solidarity with
the referents within the phrase. The analysis is supported by the list of frequencies of
the main round numbers and nouns within the approximate phrases, based on the
occurrences of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The last part of the study
is devoted to the translations of the approximate inversions into Italian and the main
translation strategies detected by the Russian-Italian parallel corpus