Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

142Non-complex frames like [Legality] and [Law] are said to be ―more universal‖.Secondly, differences between the legal systems are said to make it difficult to apply toBrazilian Portuguese the semantic tags created for the English lexical units which werebased on the American legal system. As a result, they find it more appropriate to createthe legal frames for each legal system before the annotation of the texts. However, theyalso mention that some FrameNet frames are ―very similar in different languages andcan be used as a starting point to the development of a new frame-based legal lexicon‖(Bertoldi and Chishman 2012: 13). Finally, whenever legal events are very specific of acountry they have to be described as a new frame.Interestingly, even though it is in an initial stage of development, this project hasalready revealed that differences between legal systems do not allow for a systematicuse of the frames included in FrameNet and that, for this reason, frames should becreated beforehand for each legal system. Similarly, in our research, frames are createdduring the analysis of the lexical items in each language separately. However, our goalis not to evaluate the applicability of the existing FrameNet frames to our data, but totest the possibility of assigning equivalents based on the description of terms facilitatedby FrameNet‘s methodology. In contrast to Bertoldi and Chishman‘s project, we do notrely, at least to the level that they do, on the speaker‘s intuition and on bilingualdictionaries to find the equivalents of specialized verbs. In chapter 1, we mentioned thatthere are very few resources that provide the equivalents of specialized verbs, especiallyfor European Portuguese specialized verbs. What is more, in chapter 5, it will bedemonstrated that cognate terms may not always be full equivalents. Instead, framedescription should provide the necessary information that allows the terminologist tolink one term in one language to another one in another language.Another project that implements the theoretical model of Frame Semantics andFrameNet‘s methodology in the subject field of law is that of Venturi et al. (2009) and