Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

217the first meaning was related to Criminal Law, the second one to Civil Law and the last oneto Civil Procedure Law. This kind of information was confirmed by the retired judge,Avelino Correia da Costa, and by the PhD law student, Crhistian Martins de Aquino.Finally, we consulted experts to validate the choice of labels that we used todescribe the actantial structures of the terms and that ultimately correspond to the labels ofthe FEs. A document including a brief on the project as well as the term descriptions waselaborated in Portuguese. Appendix 11 provides an example of the documents studiedtogether with the judge, Avelino Correia da Costa. Conversations were recorded and storedwith his verbal permission. The expert was given the descriptions of terms containing labelsfor situations or contexts (―Context‖), in which the participants may play roles (―Actantialstructure‖). For each sense distinction three examples of the term in context were included.The experts was asked: 1) whether he agreed with the number of senses described; 2)whether he agreed with the labels used to describe the information; and 3) whether he had asuggestion to improve descriptions. Minor modifications were made by taking into accountthe opinion of the expert.As mentioned, some stages of the methodology superimpose on other stages anddata validation was no exception to this. In fact, apart from the consultation with experts wealso used reference resources throughout the research to confirm or refute the analysis ofthe data. For instance, we consulted monolingual dictionaries such as the BLD online(2012), the Dicionario Juridico (Prata 2005 and Prata et al. 2010) as well as multilingualdatabases such as the Multilingual Legal Dictionary (Vancouver Community College2009), Termium (2012). We also used legal documents such as the Supreme Court Act, thePortuguese Code of Penal Procedure, the Portuguese Code of Civil Procedure as well asarticles and books written by scholars that are cited when necessary.