Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

77The third type of verbs, i.e. polysemous verbs, usually corresponds to verbs usedin general language that acquire a specific meaning in the subject field of law. Theirdescription should take into account the constructions in which they are used as well asthe hyperclasses and classes of their objects. Hyperclasses are very general semanticclasses such as ABSTRACT. As a great variety of legal terms are abstract concepts, theuse of hyperclasses to categorize them is not sufficiently discriminating. Hence, classesof objects can be helpful here. Nevertheless, in some cases, such as the one below,hyperclasses can still be used to illustrate the several meanings of polysemous verbs(Lerat 2002a: 209):séquestrer HUMAIN // séquestration = retenir enferméséquestrer // séquestre = mettre sous séquestreAccording to the author, contexts taken from corpora are not entirely suitable toaccount for the formalization of the verbs‘ constructions, a position with which we donot agree. He argues that only the use of classes of objects allows for capturingregularities and making generalizations. We believe that corpus study could be ofassistance here, by providing terminologists with evidence of regularities that allowthem to make generalizations on the classes of objects to which the arguments of theverbs belong.Finally, another contribution that has proposed a description of legal languagebased on this theory is that of Chodkiewicz and Gross (2005). Their goal is to accountfor the behaviour of legal language with the precision necessary for NLP applications.They argue that legal language should be treated by means of a methodology that hasproved to be efficient for general language because (Chodkiewicz and Gross 2005: 25):[…] un texte juridique comprend, pour la majorité de sa surface, des mots de lalangue générale. Il est donc impossible de traduire ou plus généralement degénérer un texte juridique sans avoir une description fine de la langue générale.