Semantic frames as organizers of the lexicon of the Criminal Procedural Law: a methodological proposal

Abstract

The context of this paper is the project of creation of the Dictionary of Legal Scenarios, which is being developed by the SemanTec/Unisinos group. It is a website for Law students and other professionals interested in the area, which aims at describing the legal domain in an accessible way. Considering such goals, the project's theoretical-methodological framework is Frame Semantics. This cognitive-linguistic theory provides a description of meaning through conceptual structures (frames), evoked by the lexicon, that also value the experiential knowledge necessary to the understanding of linguistic uses - including those related to specialized domains. With the purpose of exemplifying the description process of the legal domains conducted in this context, the paper explores the process of description of frames from the Charging and Appealing phases, discussing the related challenges and proposals of improvement of the methodology. The results indicate that the organization of the legal domain through this theory allows the systematic extraction of the lexicon that characterizes the Criminal Procedural Law. Moreover, the study highlights that the use of two different types of corpora (processable and non-processable) establishes a symbiotic relation between the quali-quantitative counterparts of the research, since the process of collection and acknowledgement of the lexical units of the investigated domain, in some cases, may demand searches that integrate integrated consultations to the study corpus and the support corpus.