Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

238language words such as to base, to conclude and to consider that acquire a specializedmeaning due to the functions they serve in the genre of texts that we studied. This situationreflects the idea of the proximity of the legal terminology with the general lexicon becauselaw and language have a particularly intimate relationship as described in the literature onlegal discourse (Chapter 2, section 2.1).In this respect, we can confirm the hypothesis according to which the extralinguisticcharacteristics of genres are of assistance in the task of term selection. For instance, theparties involved in a lawsuit have to present arguments in their defence and judges, as well,have to provide argumentation for their decisions. As we learned that the argumentation theparties have to provide is mandatory and that it happens in different moments of thejudgments, we decided to select the seemingly general language verbs, such as to base, toconclude and to consider, because they assume a special relevance in the corpus. What ismore, the task of term selection itself also allows for a better characterization of the corpustexts. In fact, as the aforementioned verbs have a high specificity score and as they wereselected in this study, we learn that judgments as a legal genre are argumentative type oftexts.The second reason why the selection and validation of terms was a challenging tasklies in the set of validation criteria that we used. Although we believe the results show thatthey were of great assistance, we were not always able to apply all criteria, namely thecriterion of morphological derivation and the criterion of paradigmatic relations. Forinstance, the Portuguese terms aditar, aplicar, deduzir, exarar, exercer, imputar, interpor,relevar, sindicar and transitar as well as the English terms to adduce, to confer, to contend,to deem, to engage, to exceed, to render, to seek and to uphold do not have morphologicalderivatives that are terms themselves, but we decided to include them because weconsidered them relevant in the judgments and provided reasons for that. This leads us to