Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

104Table 6. Ontological structure of condenar (Alves et al 2005a: 131).From this work, it is not entirely clear why the authors consider it relevant to useboth semantic labels as general as Agent and Patient and frame-related labels as specificas Evaluator and Evaluee, even though they mention that the former aim to differentiatethe participants in the predications whereas frame elements allow them to represent theparticipants in the situation evoked by the LU in question. It seems to us that framerelatedlabels would be sufficient for reasons that will be mentioned in Chapter 3.2.3.5. The speech act theoryMaciel‘s (2008) study focuses on verbs that instantiate macro speech acts in the subjectfield of law and that thus endow other verbs that occur in legal texts with theperformative character as well. This work is placed in the perspective of the speech acttheory (Austin 1962; Searle 1983). According to this theory, language is not only ameans of conveying information but also a mode of action. The basic emphasis is onwhat an utterer means by his utterance rather than what it means in a language.Therefore, the uttering of a sentence is the doing of an action. Maciel‘s hypothesis isthat actions in law are made by means of linguistic acts. Legal speech acts presuppose