Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

82.1. Legal languageLegal language has interested many scholars stemming from research communities asvaried as Translation Studies, Discourse Analysis, Languages for Special Purposes,Terminology, Jurilinguistics, and even Artificial Intelligence. Some researchers areparticularly interested in the lexical component of legal language, or terminology,whereas others concentrate on its discursive dimension. Some others consider itimportant to take into account both the lexical and discursive dimensions of legallanguage as if they were two sides of the same coin. For instance, for Cornu (2005)legal language is composed of both a ―vocabulaire juridique‖ (the group of terms thatreceive one or several meanings from the law) and a ―discours juridique‖ defined as ―lamise en oeuvre de la langue, par la parole, au service du droit‖ (Cornu 2005: 207).Other researchers are more interested in the difficulties that the co-existence ofdifferent languages and legal systems in the same territory create at the same time theyadvocate the scientific study of legal language. Gémar (2011) explains that, in thebilingual and bijural Canadian system, translation has contributed to the understandingof the interplay between language and culture, this giving rise to Jurilinguistics. Thisdiscipline emerged with the publication of Langage du droit : Essais de Jurilinguistique(1982) directed by Jean-Claude Gémar and it has since been a fruitful framework ofstudy with many contributions following on its footsteps in Canada and outside it:Jurilinguistique: entre langues et droits. Jurilinguistics: Between Law and Language(Gémar and Kasirer 2005), Langue et droit : terminologie et traduction (Gréciano andHumbley 2011), just to name a few.As this research aims to describe the legal terminology used by a specificcommunity of experts, i.e. Canadian and Portuguese judges, like Cornu (2005) we findit relevant to view legal language as a double-sided entity. The terminologicaldimension of it will be dealt in Chapters 4 and 5, in which we describe part of the