Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

174discourse of the Portuguese and Canadian Supreme Courts because each subcorpus hasapproximately the same number of words, i.e. 2,500,000 words, and includes the same textgenre. Portuguese and Canadian texts are instantiations of the same legal genre, i.e.judgments, because they share elements such as the text‘s communicative function,equivalent institutional context, structure and even content. However, they also differ insome aspects because, as Bhatia (1993) reminds us, socio-cultural constraints can affectcertain characteristics of the genre.Table 17. Comparison of the Portuguese and Canadian judgmentsComparison of the judgmentsCriteria Similarities DifferencesFunctionTo solve legal disputesSource of information for the partiesand the community of expertsJudgments may set a precedent inCanadian Law but rarely in thePortuguese law.InstitutionalcontextExpertsMacrostructureContentHigh instance courtsJudgesIdentification part and thematic partMatters of lawJudicial proceedingsArgumentationReaching a verdict…Legal theoriesSources of lawEligibility of casesJudges work within two distinctcountries and legal systems.The thematic part of Canadianjudgments is longer because judges needto use more documentation thanPortuguese judges.Topic of cases described in thejudgments differs not only from onelanguage version of the corpus toanother, but also within the same textcorpus.Table 17 summarizes the similarities and differences that characterize eachsubcorpus. Details on the aspects according to which Portuguese and Canadian texts werestudied are described into the following sections. Even if the aspects are presentedseparately, in the course of the study some are intertwined. For example, the description ofthe role played by the experts and authors of the corpus texts necessarily took intoconsideration the institutional context in which they work.