Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

239draw some considerations on the application of the criteria (L‘Homme 2004) to legalcorpora like the one we used.Firstly, although L‘Homme (2004) argues that the first criterion (meaning related tothe subject field) may not apply well to predicative units, we found that it applied well tothe verbs that we studied considering that the characteristics of the legal genre as well as oflegal discourse provide hints on the specialized meaning of some verbs. Secondly, wethought that the application of the four criteria was not always possible but that most ofthem were and that the first criterion was the most determining one, i.e. the specializedmeaning of a given candidate term could be verified if we were able to prove theirrelevance in the specialized texts. Thus, we argue for a more relaxed application of thecriteria proposed by L‘Homme (2004) in the corpus used in this research, namely for theacceptability of three out of the four criteria, as well as for the primacy of criterion numberone.The fact that we did not succeed to apply the aforementioned criteria allows us todraw considerations on the findings of Lorente (2007) according to which the nature anddegree of the connection between verbs and a noun term is the main criterion foridentifying verbs that convey specialized knowledge. Lorente (2007) argues that when thereis a lexical relation between a given verb and a noun term relevant in the specialized fieldsuch as morphological derivation or a paradigmatic relation, the verb belongs to thecategory of quasiterminological verbs. When there is no morphological relation betweenthe verb and a relevant term in the specialized field but the verb‘s internal argument is aterm, then the verb belongs to the category of phraseological verbs. When there is noconnection between the verb and a noun term but there is a relevant term in the constructionof the verb (other than its internal argument), the verb belongs to the category of the verbsof logical relations. In order to be specialized knowledge units, verbs have to relate with atleast a noun term because noun terms are prototypical terms and their strong referential