The Role Of Metaphor In Legal Terminology

Metaphor is one of the most often used figures of speech in literature and in everyday life and the judicial field is not an exception. It has been discovered previously in this paper that a legal term must be unambiguous and precise and it might seem that there is no place for metaphor in legal terminology. Regardless of that, legal terminology includes terms that have been created through the change of meaning of general words. As Veisbergs claims (2013: 75): “at the basis of new meaning formation often stands a metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and figurative use, since vocabulary extension is usually based on likeness, similarity and association”. The reason for applying this strategy in the creation legal terminology might be that due to its

However they have gone further by arguing that metaphor is not just a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish, it is not characteristic of language alone, but is actually the basis of human conceptual system (ibid.). Lakoff and Johnson express the idea that the concepts governing the thoughts structure what is being perceived and also govern everyday functioning, thus they state that “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (ibid.). They point out that it is typical for human mind to think of one thing in terms of another, and they exemplify it by the concept of argument is

He states that “it is easier to impart a new meaning to an existing word than to create a new word” (Veisbergs, 2013: 730). To sum up, this chapter has been covering the theoretical background on the metaphor. It has established that in modern English legal terminology metaphor is not as widespread as it used to be in medieval times, when the language of Law used to be figurative. It has also briefly commented upon the theory concerning metaphor as it was presented by Lakoff and Johnson, Childs and Fowler, and Wales. During the overview of the theoretical background of the research the following information that is relevant for the empirical study has been covered. The language and the terminology of legal English are closely related to the historic and cultural background of England, therefore there are many terms borrowed from other languages. The terminology of legal English follows specific requirements and has its special characteristics. The metaphorical terms included in the terminology of legal English are highly useful, as they allow describing a phenomenon without going into great detail. It is possible due to the ability of metaphor to transmit some phenomena from one concept upon another, in this way showing the particular similarity between