Methodological bases for assigning terminological equivalents

This paper investigates the methodological bases for assigning terminological equivalents that have been proposed by lexicographers and terminologists. It will be argued that consistent methodologies for assigning equivalents are still lacking. We then describe a methodology based on Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1977, 1982, 1985; Fillmore and Atkins 1992) for assigning the equivalents of specialized verbs that occur in a comparable corpus of judgments and we provide arguments to the effect that a methodological approach to the establishment of terminological equivalence based on the frames evoked by the terms as well as on their syntagmatic behaviour is a suitable approach for the identification of equivalents. The resulting descriptions of the specialized verbs, of the frames and the identified equivalents were encoded in a resource called JuriDiCo from which examples will be drawn to illustrate our point.