Verbs of judgment in English and Portuguese: What contrastive analysis can say about Frame Semantics

Abstract

This paper discusses the boundaries of Frame Semantics for multilingual lexicon development. This is a contrastive study of verbs of judgment in English and Brazilian Portuguese using the parallel corpus COMPARA. The contrastive analysis of four lexical units, to accuse, to blame, to criticize and to praise places emphasis on points to be developed in order to create multilingual frame-based databases that are able to describe lexical meaning more broadly. The discussion of translation equivalents is important not only for translation studies, but also for multilingual lexicon development. Finding a proper translation equivalent is the fi rst step in the development of multilingual resources. This paper explores the complex meaning networks existing between languages when they are compared.Key words: Frame Semantics, verbs of judgment, contrastive linguistics.