FIGHT Metaphors in Legal Discourse What is Unsaid in the Story (original) (raw)
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Legal discourse has been studied so far by numerous linguists and legal experts. Linguistic studies have predominantly focused on stylistic elements of the legal register, such as morphological and syntactic features. Until recently the figurative nature of legal register and its great potential were completely disregarded by linguists. While legal experts realised the importance and power of metaphor and metonymy decades ago, linguists have been slow to follow. The aim of this paper is a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors and metonymies in the legislation systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UK and the US. The metaphors and metonymies used in the analysis are collected from Higher Education Acts from these three countries.
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The Submerged Metaphoricality of Legal Language
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According to psychoanalysis in Freud and beyond, human beings have an ego ideal, or self-identity projected outward onto society, so why can’t a discipline like the Law? Like Mathematics or Psychoanalysis, Law surely has a self-identity it continually articulates and applies. If the Law would speak for itself, how would it explain this identity? One answer would be that the Law’s version of itself as logical to the point of absurdity is projected onto society as a whole, which it subjugates through the illusion of quasi-mathematical certainty. Caught up in this intoxicating mirage, its various purveyors and practitioners, like lawyers, work tirelessly to embody Law’s idea of itself through the endless verbal (oral and written) performance of briefs, arguments, opening and closing statements, depositions, client meetings, emails, and even more ephemeral forms of expression, like Tweets or Snaps
Journal of English as an International Language, 2017
The study was a humble attempt at cross-analyzing court decisions drafted in Ameri- can, Philippine, and Indonesian Englishes in the perspective of world Englishes (WEs). Using the contrastive genre analysis framework of Le, Kui, and Ying-Long (2008), and Cheng, Sin, and Li (2008), the study examined three authentic court deci- sions taken from the Kachruvian inner, outer, and expanding Englishes, namely, American English, Philippine English, and Indonesian English. The data were analyzed three times in terms of (1) rhetorical segments and functions, and (2) moves and segments. In the level of rhetorical segments and functions, results revealed that (1) the three court decisions exhibited more similarities than differences. On the other hand, (2) the legal texts displayed certain moves and steps, regular with and distinct from each other. Furthermore, certain linguistic characteristics of the court decisions were also revealed. Cultures of the inner, outer, and expanding circles embedded in the discourse of the three court decisions were exposed. In conclusion, legal cultures through the lens of WEs have the potential of uncovering the underlying roots of court decisions as legal genre. It is, therefore, recommended that resilient initiatives in studying English for Legal Purposes (ELP) must be undertaken to thrive such field to a definite level of critical contrastive rhetoric with respect to WEs.