Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

270realizations of the FE OLD LAW do not take the form of proper nouns and, as a result, onlythe head of the NP was annotated. Interestingly, in the contexts of the Portuguese verbrevogar, terms like artigo are usually followed by a number which was not annotated aspart of the realization. The numbers of the artigos can cause the referent of the term artigoto vary considerably. This indicates that both in the English corpus and in the Portuguesecorpus the FE OLD LAW refers to written laws or part of them. Therefore, the linguisticrealizations of the actants of the two verbs evoke the same kind of entities and most of themare even equivalents. Consider the following example:amend 2sectionrevogar 2artigosectionartigoAs the terms section and artigo are equivalent, to amend a section and revogar umartigo are completely interchangeable in a translation context, i.e. we can translate toamend a section by revogar um artigo and we can also translate revogar um artigo by toamend a section.Finally, the comparison of the syntactic patterns also revealed that the valence of thetwo verbs is similar. NEW LAW and LEGISLATOR typically take the form of NPs and occuras the syntactic subject of the verbs. OLD LAW typically takes the form of an NP and occursas the syntactic object of the verbs. We remind the reader that, when compared to the othercriteria, the analysis of the syntactic patterns of the verbs serves mainly as a confirming orrefuting criterion for the validation of the equivalence relation established between twoterms. Only when major differences between the syntactic patterns of the verbs areidentified does this criterion refute the possibility of full equivalence. For instance, a majordifference in the syntactic patterns of the verbs can consist in the lack of coincidence of thesyntactic patterns of two or more actants of a verb.