Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

100legalizar and compulsar are only interchangeable when the verb‘s syntactic object is thenoun copia. When legitimar selects as syntactic object entities denoting people(quienes, los que, accionistas, socios, administradores) or representative bodies(colegios oficiales, administraciones, consejos), it cannot be replaced by any of theother verbs in the series. Similarly, when legalizar selects the nouns libro, registro orficha as internal argument, which occurs exclusively in commercial law, it is notinterchangeable with any of the other verbs of the group.The application of the criteria taken into account by the authors allows them toexplain why compulsar, legalizar and legitimar can be used as synonyms in thefollowing contexts only: in commercial law and administrative law; in legal texts (laws,regulations, decrees and regulations); when their meaning refers to the verification ofdocuments so as to give them legal status; when the lexical selection of the internalarguments of the three verbs is restricted to signatures, documents, copies and the likeand never to people (legitimar) or records (legalizar).We believe that the differentiation of the categories of entities that occur in thecorpus as the arguments of the aforementioned verbs would have benefited fromapproaches like the theory of classes of objects (section 2.3.1) and Frame Semantics(Chapter 3) which insist on more fine-grained generalizations on the arguments of theverbs instead of the use of semantic labels as general as Agent and Patient.2.3.4. The ontology-oriented approachSpecialized verbs occurring in legal texts have also been described for informationretrieval and question and answer systems. Alves et al. (2005a, 2005b, 2007) explainthat one of their aims is to develop the information retrieval system of the ProcuradoriaGeral da Républica of Portugal (Office of the Public Prosecutor of the Republic ofPortugal) and that their methodology is ―an integrated representation of the verbal