Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

241extraction of Portuguese terms because only 23.6% of the English candidate terms wereeliminated against 34.2% of the Portuguese candidate terms. We believe that the mainreason for this lies in the fact that Portuguese verbs are highly inflected compared toEnglish verbs and, as a result, Portuguese verb forms lend themselves more to ambiguitiesthan English ones.Finally, we consider the number of terms that were selected for each languagesufficient for the research purposes and the corpus large enough to gather ampleinformation on the selected terms. As it will be mentioned in the following sections, thetotal of 200 terms allowed us to identify a significant number of frames that can grouptogether a greater or smaller number of terms as well as 165 pairs of equivalents. It will beshown that some of the frames that were identified only contain one specialized verb, butother verbs as well as nouns, adjectives and adverbs could probably be added were theresearch to be further developed.5.2. Frames observedSemantic frames, or conceptual scenarios, constitute the theoretical and methodologicalmeans that we used to describe the extralinguistic information associated to the specializedverbs selected from one specific kind of judicial decisions of Portugal and of Canada. Eachspecialized verb in one of its meanings (also called term) is said to evoke a frame. Eachframe was assigned a label, a definition, a list of the mandatory and optional participants orFEs, and a list of the terms that evoke the conceptual scenario. We grouped together the200 selected terms into 76 frames.In this sub-chapter, we present the number of terms that a frame can group togetherand provide an example of a frame that groups together a large number of frames (section5.2.1). Then, we describe the nature of the relation between terms grouped together into the