Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

26judgments (Civil Law) and Canadian judgments (Common Law). To the best of ourknowledge, no such comparative study has been carried out so far. Chapter 4 includes asection on the analysis of these legal texts as well as a comparison of both and Chapter5 describes the most relevant verbs in the texts, the scenarios in which they participateas well as their equivalents.2.1.2.4. Genres, corpus design and terminology interpretationAlthough genre has always been a consideration in the organisation of general corporaand an important issue in corpus design, it was not until recently that terminologistsstarted reflecting on genre as a criterion for the design of specialized corpora(Aussenac-Gilles and Condamines 2007; Condamines 2008; Costa 2001, 2004, 2005;Meyer and Mackintosh 1996; Rogers 2000).Aussenac-Gilles and Condamines (2007: 140) state that: ―La prise en compte dela notion de genre permet de constituer des catégories de textes censés avoir les mêmescaractéristiques extralinguistiques et les mêmes régularités linguistiques.‖ The idea isthat the notion of ―genre‖ can be useful for terminologists who use corpora to describeterminological data. The delimitation of the subject field of which the corpus should berepresentative so as to establish the boundaries of the terminology that one aims todescribe is a task that has to be completed at an early stage of the terminologist‘s work.One way of doing this is by taking genres as a means of characterization of the variousaspects of specialized discourse.Rogers (2000) argues that genre, as a concept which has a classificatory role, isan important means of structuring corpora in order to facilitate the interpretation ofterminological data. From this point of view, it can be inferred that corpora should befirst constituted according to extralinguistic criteria (genres) and only then can theirlinguistic features (terminology) be observed and interpreted. This is in line with