Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

105entities with authority to transmit meaning as well as a set of norms that establish theuse of terms. Compliance with conventional procedures determines the success orfailure of the act. Verbs have a performative character and, as a result, they play anextremely important role in the subject field of law because they can create or deleteentities, punish or condemn somebody, allow or prohibit something.The author uses a corpus of constitutional texts from the eight members of theCommunity of Portuguese Language Countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor). She explainsthat the Constitution follows a pre-established graphical form that, together with thewriting characteristics of legal texts, constitutes a good example of the canonicalsemiotics of the subject field. This structure is one of the elements that correspond tothe institutional facts pointed out by Searle (1983) as indispensable for the performanceof a speech act. In this corpus she identified 829 verbs and, based on the analysis ofconcordances, she selected three types of verbs that seemed to be performative in theconstitutional texts (Maciel 2008: 6):1. Verbs that create a juridical norm: promulgar (Eng. to enact), consagrar(Eng. to lay down), decretar (Eng. to order) and aprovar (Eng. to approve);2. Verbs that endow certain individuals and/or institutions with a part ofgovernmental power: caber (Eng. to be formally responsible), competir(Eng. to be entitled to) and incumbir (Eng. to place the responsibility for);3. Verbs that rule the behaviour in a politically organized society: permitir(Eng. to allow), facultar (Eng. to provide), proibir (Eng. to prohibit) andvedar (Eng. to preclude).