Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

152spécialisés, puisque la plupart des travaux en terminologie tendent à se focaliser sur lesnoms et les adjectifs‖.Thus, our second argument lies in the assumption that Frame Semantics and theFrameNet methodology are useful to study terminology, in general, and legal terminology,in particular. Frame Semantics assumes that content words in a language are best explainedby appealing to the conceptual backgrounds (the frames) that underlie their meanings andmotivate their use. Its methodological application, i.e. FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010),takes on a situational perspective, uses corpus evidence and provides information on thesemantics as well as on the syntactical behaviour of the items under analysis which isinteresting for terminology work that wishes to combine the analysis of extralinguistic andlinguistic properties of terms.What is more, Frame Semantics is to a certain extent based on empiricalobservations of technical language, namely on observations of legal language. For instance,Fillmore observed that for many instances of polysemy a word has a general use ineveryday language but has been given a separate use in technical language (Fillmore 1982:124). He calls this phenomenon ―special-purpose framings of words‖ and illustrates it withsome examples taken from legal language (Fillmore 1982: 128):In the prototype case of events fitting the word MURDER, one person (A),intending to kill a second person (B), acts in such a way as to cause that person todie. This prototype does not cover a case in which A, intending to kill B, aims hisgun at B, and kills C (who is standing next to B) instead. Some of the properties ofMURDER relate A and B; other relate A to C. The question somebody needs toanswer, of course, is whether for the purposes of the law, it is proper to say that Amurdered C. The law does this, not by modifying the definition of MURDER sothat it will cover this ‗wrong-target‘ case, but by adding to the system of legalsemantics a statutory interpretation principle called ‗Transfer of Intent‘ accordingto which A‘s intent to kill B is fictitiously transferred to C so that the definition ofMURDER can fully fit what A did to C.