Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

260―Irregularity‖ is the technical term for every defect in practical proceedings, or themode of conducting an action or defense, as distinguishable from defects Inpleadings. 3 Chit. Gen. Pr. 509. The doing or not doing that, in the conduct of a suitat law, which, conformably with the practice of the court, ought or ought not to bedone. Doe ex dem. Cooper v. Ilarter, 2 Ind. 252. In canon law. Any impedimentwhich prevents a man from taking holy orders.Thus, the core FE IRREGULARITY has a negative semantic prosody in that itpresupposes some kind of ―violation or nonobservance of established rules [...], a defect inpractical proceedings‖. As it can be observed from Table 31 and Table 32, the majority ofterms that instantiate this FE show a negative affective meaning: error, punishment,nulidade, violação, etc.Table 31. Linguistic realizations of the core FE IRREGULARITY in the English corpusThe comparison of Table 31 and Table 32 also reveals that this negative affectivemeaning is more evident in the occurrences of the FE IRREGULARITY in the Portuguesecorpus than in the English corpus. However, the analysis of the English verbs and theircooccurrents reveals that the negative prosody manifests itself in two different ways in theEnglish corpus. Compare the contexts of constitute 1 and impugn 1 :