Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

307As the research specifically aimed at assigning the equivalents of specialized verbs,the various theoretical frameworks that have been applied to the treatment of this kind ofpredicative units were reviewed as well as the few contributions on the identification ofspecialized verb equivalents. The findings of the research confirm the principles set out inthe works of Chodkiewicz and Gross (2005), Lerat (2002), L‘Homme (2008) and Pimenteland L‘Homme (2011): the argument structures of the verbs as well as a classification of theactants in terms of the entities that can instantiate them are of paramount importance to theidentification of the equivalents. Therefore, in this respect, the findings of the research arenot original. In fact, the originality of the current contribution lies in the systematicity ofthe methodology as well as in the possibility it provides for identifying several candidateequivalents and for differentiating between full and partial equivalents. This leads us todraw considerations on the kind of theoretical frameworks that can be used to describespecialized verbs and assign their equivalents.It was observed that the arguments of predicates in legal discourse usually refer toabstract legal entities which can be sub-categorized by means of fine-grainedgeneralizations. The theories that were discussed that are the best equipped to examinespecialized verbs in these molds are the theory of the classes of objects and FrameSemantics, even though the theories were originally conceived to describe generallanguage. As mentioned, the main difference between the theory of the classes of objectsand the theory of Frame Semantics as well as FrameNet‘s methodology resides in the factthat the latter directly explains the scenarios in which a given class of predicates participatewhereas the former does not. In addition, the notion of semantic frame as a scenario that isto a fair degree language independent (Boas 2005; Baker 2009) served, in this research, notonly to describe the extralinguistic properties of specialized verbs but also to assign theirequivalents.