Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

305The study started with the review of: the literature on legal language; the definitionsof equivalence provided in bilingual lexicography and in terminology; the methodologiesthat the disciplines use to assign equivalents; the approaches and frameworks that havebeen applied to the description of specialized verbs; the applicability of Frame Semanticsand the FrameNet methodology to the elaboration of general and specialized lexicalresources, in general, and to the elaboration of multilingual resources, in particular. Theinterpretation of the research results allows us to confirm or refute some principlesdiscussed in the state of the art and to suggest a number of avenues for future researchdevelopment.With reference to the main characteristics of legal language, in general, and ofjudgments as a text, in particular, the findings of the research, namely the observation of theselected verbs, confirmed the proximity between the legal lexicon and the general lexiconthat is described in the literature as well as the importance of taking legal genres intoaccount when designing a lexical resource that describes legal terminology. In fact, mostverbs that were selected are part of the general lexicon, but they denote actions that arerelevant in the corpus texts and, as a result, their behaviour may display specificities (e.g.unusual choice of prepositions, combinatorial preferences).In contrast, the findings of the research do not support the view according to whichlegal terminology is untranslatable because it is ―culture-bound‖ and therefore extremelyanisomorphic. For instance, Sandrini (1995, 1996) argues that absolute equivalence is onlypossible with concepts coming from the same legal system and proposes a comparative anddescriptive approach in terminography that does not aim at complete conceptualcorrespondence but at complete documentation of the national concepts. The resultsobtained in this research show that, at least, specialized verbs are translatable because inmost cases more than one equivalent was assigned to a verb. This leads us to formulate twohypotheses and suggest a compromise between the two. On the one hand, specialized verbs