Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

180Two lists of candidate terms were extracted: a list of Portuguese candidate termswas extracted from the Portuguese subcorpus (cf. section 4.1.2) and a list of Englishcandidate terms was extracted from the English subcorpus (cf. section 4.1.3). For theextraction of Portuguese candidate terms, a part of the freely available corpusCETEMPublico was used as reference corpus. This corpus includes texts of around 2,600editions of the Portuguese newspaper PÚBLICO written between 1991 and 1998 andamounting to approximately 180 million words. Appendix 5 lists the Portuguese candidateterms with the highest specificity score.The newspaper section of the BNC World was used as the reference corpus for theextraction of the English candidate terms. The BNC World‟s articles were publishedbetween 1985 and 1994. Appendix 6 lists the English candidate terms with the highestspecificity score.4.3.2. Validation of candidate termsIn order to validate candidate terms, we analyzed their behaviour in the corpus by means ofa concordance tool called AntConc (Anthony 2006) and used a set of criteria proposed byL‘Homme (2004) which have been tested in previous research projects (Carreno 2005; LeSerrech 2008). According to this author, a given lexical item may be a term if: 1) it has ameaning related to the subject field in question; 2) its actants are terms themselvesaccording to criterion 1; 3) its morphological derivatives are terms themselves according tocriteria 1 and 2, and there is a semantic relation between the lexical item and its derivatives;and 4) the lexical item has other paradigmatic relations to other terms validated by all threecriteria. L‘Homme (2004) argues that the first criterion is more easily applied to termsdenoting entities, whereas the last three criteria apply mainly to predicative units.