Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

4. MethodologyThis chapter outlines the methodology we use to select specialized verbs from a corpus ofjudgments, to describe the linguistic and extralinguistic properties of the verbs, and toassign their equivalents. Section 4.1 focuses on the corpus design and Section 4.2 providesdetails on the methodology workflow.4.1. Corpus designThe research presents a methodology to assign equivalents for specialized verbs taken froma comparable corpus of European Portuguese and Canadian English judgments. We use acomparable corpus instead of a parallel corpus because no Portuguese-English or English-Portuguese translations of judgments are available. It was therefore necessary to design andbuild a new corpus for the objectives of the research.In chapter 2, we argued that it was important to take text genres into account when itcomes to designing a specialized corpus, because this is thought to allow for a moreaccurate analysis of terminological data. In this subchapter, it will be demonstrated that thePortuguese and Canadian texts included in the corpus correspond to the same text genre,although they are culturally different products written by experts working in two differentcountries and legal systems, i.e. Portugal and the civil law, and Canada and the commonlaw, respectively. It will also be argued that the corpus assembled is comparable andrepresentative of the discourse of Portuguese and Canadian high court judges.As there is no consensus on what makes a corpus comparable, guidelines put forthin the literature were followed but were not limited to them. For example, authors likeBowker and Pearson (2002), Maia (2003) and McEnery and Xiao (2007) privilege differentissues in the design of comparable corpora and seldom do they clarify the oft-mentionedcriterion of ―similarity‖ or ―comparability‖. Bowker and Pearson (2002: 93) argue thatcorpus comparability is ensured when features such as subject matter or topic, text types,