Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

99to show the mismatch that occurs between the information on synonymic relationsdescribed in dictionaries and the interchangeability of this kind of units in differentcontexts of use. The authors provide a methodology for the analysis of lexical variationthat consists in crossing and adding a set of criteria to ensure, reject or set conditions ofa particular relation of synonymy between two lexical items in specialized texts.In order to do that, the authors randomly select 36 lemmas from the Diccionariode términos jurídicos. Inglés-Español. Español-Inglés (1997) by Alcaraz and Hughes.They observe their frequency of use in three different sources of information: the web,the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual, and the corpus de derecho en lenguaespañola del Corpus Técnico del IULA. They verify that the selected verbs often occurin both general and specialized texts and proceed to analyze how the occurrences aredistributed in the Corpus Técnico, namely in the several branches of law (civil law,constitutional law, penal law, etc.). Finally, verbs are studied in terms of their semanticand syntactic behaviour. The definitions of the verbs provided in four dictionaries thatthey use are compared to the meaning the occurrences seem to have in the corpus texts.The argument structure of verbs, the semantic roles of the arguments as well asrecurrent lexical combinatorics are also taken into account.The authors conclude that there are many cases of partial synonymy because: 1)some verbs have a higher frequency in the corpus than other verbs; 2) their thematicdistribution (through the several branches of law) is different; 3) they occur in differentgenres of texts (e.g. legislation, dispositions, law manuals); 4) some verbs have a moregeneral meaning than others; 5) the argument structure of the verbs, the semantic rolesof the arguments and the lexical selection differ. For example, compulsar, legalizar andlegitimar are partial synonyms because, although they have the same argument structure(x(y)) and the arguments have the same semantic role (Agent and Patient), legitimar andcompulsar are interchangeable only when their syntactic object is the noun firma, and