Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

iiAbstractMultilingual terminological resources do not always include valid equivalents of legalterms for two main reasons. Firstly, legal systems can differ from one language communityto another and even from one country to another because each has its own history andtraditions. As a result, the non-isomorphism between legal and linguistic systems mayrender the identification of equivalents a particularly challenging task. Secondly, byfocusing primarily on the definition of equivalence, a notion widely discussed in translationbut not in terminology, the literature does not offer solid and systematic methodologies forassigning terminological equivalents. As a result, there is a lack of criteria to guide bothterminologists and translators in the search and validation of equivalent terms.This problem is even more evident in the case of predicative units, such as verbs.Although some terminologists (L‘Homme 1998; Lerat 2002; Lorente 2007) have workedon specialized verbs, terminological equivalence between units that belong to this part ofspeech would benefit from a thorough study. By proposing a novel methodology to assignthe equivalents of specialized verbs, this research aims at defining validation criteria forthis kind of predicative units, so as to contribute to a better understanding of thephenomenon of terminological equivalence as well as to the development of multilingualterminography in general, and to the development of legal terminography, in particular.The study uses a Portuguese-English comparable corpus that consists of a singlegenre of texts, i.e. Supreme Court judgments, from which 100 Portuguese and 100 Englishspecialized verbs were selected. The description of the verbs is based on the theory ofFrame Semantics (Fillmore 1976, 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992), on theFrameNet methodology (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010), as well as on the methodology forcompiling specialized lexical resources, such as DiCoInfo (L‘Homme 2008), developed inthe Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte at the Université de Montréal. The researchreviews contributions that have adopted the same theoretical and methodological