Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

181Despite this word of caution, we decided to apply not only criteria 2, 3 and 4 butalso criterion 1 as it may guide us in the identification of specialized meanings and frames.We used external resources such as law manuals, monolingual dictionaries, legislation, andother documentation resources to help us understand the meaning of candidate terms. Forthe application of criterion 2 we used only corpus evidence and for the application ofcriteria 3 and 4 we used corpus evidence along with the aforementioned type of externalresources. The following paragraphs describe the application of these criteria to theselection of a Portuguese and an English candidate terms.(Criterion 1) For example, absolver (to acquit) is a Portuguese candidate term witha very high specificity score (cf. Appendix 5) and it is quite likely a term because it has ameaning related to the subject field of law, in general, and to Penal Procedure Law, inparticular. According to Santos et al. (2010), Penal Procedure follows three stages in thePortuguese doctrine: inquérito (investigation), instrução (optional stage; preparatoryinquiry) and julgamento (judgment). Absolver evokes the last stage of Penal Procedure, i.e.the trial, and as a linguistic form it typically occurs in the last section of the corpus texts,i.e. in the decision. At the end of the trial, the judge(s) and/or the jury have to decidewhether the defendant is guilty or not of a crime of which he is accused. Their role is toreach a decision that performs the act of absolver (to find somebody not guilty of thecharges of which they are accuse) and/or of condenar (to find somebody guilty of thecharges of which they are accused).(Criterion 2) Secondly, the verb absolver is a predicative unit whose actants areterms themselves. In the corpus, the first actant of absolver is realized by terms denotingeither a judge (juiz) or a group of judges (tribunal), the intervenients with legal power toreach a decision after the case is tried. The second actant of absolver is typically thedefendant or the accused (arguido, réu, etc.), the intervenients in a case on which a decision