Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

267LAW and ISSUE. For all these reasons, we believe that semantic frames were a very goodmeans to account for the polysemy in legal language.Semantic frames also proved to be a useful apparatus for identifying semanticrelations between terms. Terms that were grouped together into the same frame necessarilyhave in common the fact that they evoke the same conceptual scenario, but the way theterms perspectivize the scenario may vary. This variation can be identified by analyzinghow the participants in the frame are instantiated in the contexts of each term. So, as Freixaand Lorente (2006) who use a different but compatible methodology, we were able toidentify near synonyms such as remedy 1 and resolve 1 that have the same number and natureof actants but that are interchangeable only when their syntactic object corresponds to termswith a negative semantic prosody such as abuse, conflict and deficiency.Finally, we used an annotation methodology based on FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al.2010) as well as on L‘Homme (2008) that allowed us to formalize the semantic andsyntactic properties of the specialized verbs grouped into the frames. These propertiesproved to be useful for the identification of the semantic relations between the verbs as wellas for the identification of the equivalents to which we will refer at the end of the followingsub-chapter.5.3. Equivalents observedThe methodology we developed allowed us to identify 165 pairs of candidate equivalentsamong the 200 Portuguese and English terms that were grouped together into 76 frames. 33out of the 76 frames (i.e. 43%) group together terms that are candidate equivalents(Appendix 16 lists the frames grouping together candidate equivalents). We observed twodegrees of equivalence: full equivalence and partial equivalence. 117 pairs of equivalents(71%) not only evoke the same conceptual scenario but the actantial structures of the verbs,