Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

52items in different languages, whereas Yong and Peng (2007) put forth five categories ofanisomorphism: cultural, linguistic, componential, extralinguistic and specializedanisomorphism.An example of linguistic anisomorphism is when languages differ in thegrammatical category of gender. For instance, the word sea is masculine in Portuguese(o mar) whereas in French it is feminine (la mer). An example of specializedanisomorphism is that of the Portuguese term arguido and the English term suspect, towhich we referred in sub-chapter 2.1.1. Portuguese Criminal Law makes a distinctionbetween arguido and suspeito (suspect). An arguido is someone who is being treated bythe police as more than a witness but has not been arrested or charged. They can chooseto enter this status of their own volition or by being nominated by the police. Incontrast, a suspeito is someone who is thought of as having committed or participated ina crime or who is about to commit or participate in a crime and they cannot enter thisstatus voluntarily (Antunes 2004). British Criminal Procedure does not make the samedistinction because the criminal system is different.For other authors, anisomorphism is to be explained from a conceptual point ofview, i.e. the number of concepts is not the same in two different languages and/or theconceptual systems may differ in structure (Svensén 2009). Well-known examples ofthe difference in the number of concepts are the Eskimo language, which has a largestock of concepts relating to snow compared to other languages, and Arabic, which issimilarly equipped in regard to camels. Usually, this phenomenon takes place when agiven reality or object plays a particularly important role in the culture of the linguisticcommunity. Table 2 illustrates a situation in which the structure of conceptual systemsdiffers from one language to another.