Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

185Finally, some candidate terms were not included because they did not meet thecriteria mentioned at the beginning of the section. This is the case of Portuguese candidateterms such as auferir (to earn money or a salary), constar (to be in), resultar (to resultfrom), and the case of English candidate terms such as characterize, justify and relate. Forinstance, auferir is not a term because it does not have a meaning specifically related to thesubject field of law nor does it specifically relate to the judgment scenario. Similarly, relateis not a valid term because the analysis of its concordances revealed that relate does nothave a meaning specifically related to the subject field of law nor does its behaviour in thecorpus indicate a different usage when compared to general language.4.3.3. Sense distinctionsCircumscribing the meaning of terms is a task that inevitably accompanied the validation ofcandidate terms as it is one of the means for verifying if candidate terms meet the firstcriterion mentioned in section 4.3.2 (the candidate term has a meaning related to the subjectfield). Nonetheless, in this stage of the methodology we were interested in examining themeanings of the selected lexical items in the corpus so as to distinguish specializedmeanings and exclude general ones, if there were any. We also followed the idea accordingto which ―meanings are discovered in clusters of instances that share enough commonfeatures to justify being treated as a coherent ‗meaning group‘‖ (Atkins et al. 2003: 334citing Hanks (2000) and Kilgarriff (1997)).In order to accomplish this task, the behaviour of the selected lexical items wasstudied by means of the concordance tool AntConc (Anthony 2006). For instance, considerthe concordances of the verb to satisfy in Figure 25.