Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

78De plus, il n‘existe pas de limite claire entre la langue générale et la langue dudroit parce qu‘il n‘y a aucune différence de nature entre celles-ci.In fact, Chodkiewicz and Gross (2005) view ―legal language‖ as discourse thatis instantiated in texts which, in turn, contain predicates. In this specific contribution,the authors propose to describe all predicates used in legal discourse by means of thetheory of classes of objects. The considerations they draw on verbs are similar to thosedrawn by Lerat (2002a, 2002b).To sum up, in the approach that we have just described, verbs used in legaldiscourse are seen as relevant relational entities for NLP whose meaning depends on thekind of arguments with which they occur. Arguments of predicates in legal discourseusually refer to abstract legal entities which can be sub-categorized by means of finegrainedgeneralizations (classes of objects). The stricter the argument selection, thehigher are the probabilities of verbs being specialized. Legal texts can be treated forNLP purposes by means of a theoretical and methodological framework originallyconceived for general language. The main difference between this theoreticalframework and the one which will be used in this research, which was also originallydeveloped for general language (chapter 3), lies in the fact that the scenarios in which agiven class of predicates participate are only indirectly explained.2.3.2. Explanatory and Combinatorial LexicologyL‘Homme (1995, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2004) was one of the first authors that argued forthe study of specialized verbs as well as for their inclusion in specialized lexicalresources. She has also contributed to the study of specialized verb equivalents, as wewill demonstrate in section 2.3.6. For the time being, we would like to refer to two otherparticularly relevant contributions of the author. The first one consists in a set of criteriafor validating candidate terms belonging to several word classes including verbs that the