Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

2. The state of the artIn order to identify the equivalents of specialized verbs that occur in the Supreme Courtjudgments of Portugal and Canada, it is necessary to examine beforehand: 1) the maincharacteristics of legal discourse, in general, and of judgments, in particular; 2) thephenomenon and the typologies of equivalence as well as the methodologies forsearching equivalents; 3) the theoretical and methodological approaches that have beenapplied to the description of specialized verbs; and, 4) the theoretical andmethodological approaches that have been developed for identifying the equivalents ofspecialized verbs.This chapter is organized as follows. Section 2.1 describes the specificities oflegal language emphasizing its discursive dimension. One of the ways in which legallanguage has been approached consists in identifying the genres of discourse thatconstitute the broad subject field of law. Central attention will be given to judgments asa text genre because the corpus used in the research is composed of judgments producedby the Supreme Court of Canada and by the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça de Portugaland, therefore, it aims to be representative of the language of judges. Section 2.2 dealswith the phenomenon of equivalence seen from two different viewpoints: lexicographyand terminology. Here, definitions and typologies of equivalence are provided alongwith illustrative examples. It will be argued that the literature is silent when it comes toproposing sound methodologies for searching equivalents. Section 2.3 reviews differenttheoretical frameworks used to describe specialized verbs. Special focus is given toapproaches that have studied verbs occurring in legal texts. Finally, section 2.4discusses the few contributions on the assignment of specialized verb equivalents andjustifies the necessity of the current research.