Abstract
This paper focuses on two legal languages such as the legal English developed by the European Union institutions (Euro English) and the legal Chinese of Mainland China, to study whether the mental representations and the embodied simulation created by the conceptual metaphors for the same Western concept, right, differ in any significant ways. By analysing the data contained in two large corpora, this study has found that, despite the common origin of the concept right in the two legal languages, they conceptualise it in a significantly different fashion. Finally, the findings of this study are read through the theoretical framework proposed for this special issue—hybridity and the Third Space. While it is somewhat straightforward to conceive of Euro English as a hybrid language, owing to the multilingual and supranational setting where it is used, this study has found that the Chinese legal language, too, is a hybrid language exhibiting linguistic features that intersect different belief systems.
Highlights
Justice Benjamin Cardozo famously admonished against the use of metaphors in legal language: “Metaphors in law”, he argued, “are to be narrowly watched, for though starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it” [16].About 50 years after Cardozo’s warning, Lakoff and Johnson [41] published a famous study, Metaphors We Live By, that radically changed the path of many fields of scholarly enquiry in semantics and other areas relating to meaning-making, including semiotics
From the quantitative perspective, the number of linguistic and conceptual metaphors that my corpus search found for right are higher in Euro English than in legal Chinese
Euro English uses seventeen linguistic metaphors to realise six conceptual metaphors, while legal Chinese uses three linguistic metaphors to realise half of the conceptual metaphors instantiated in Euro English
Summary
Justice Benjamin Cardozo famously admonished against the use of metaphors in legal language: “Metaphors in law”, he argued, “are to be narrowly watched, for though starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it” [16].About 50 years after Cardozo’s warning, Lakoff and Johnson [41] published a famous study, Metaphors We Live By, that radically changed the path of many fields of scholarly enquiry in semantics and other areas relating to meaning-making, including semiotics. In the examples I have used before (‘This will cheer him up’, etc.), ‘up’, ‘cloud nine’ and ‘down’ are linguistic wordings presenting a semantic tension between their literal and contextual meanings which makes them linguistic metaphors. The literal meaning metaphor scholars look for is more accurately termed basic or primary meaning, that is, a meaning that is more concrete, more body related, more precise and historically older than the one in context. Whenever there is such a semantic tension there is metaphoricity. The SDs of up and down are mapped onto the TDs of happiness and sadness, respectively
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