Title Analysis of metaphors in major judgments of the court of justice of the european union /
Translation of Title Metaforų analizė Europos Sąjungos Teisingumo Teismo „Svarbiausių sprendimų apžvalgoje“.
Authors Petkevičiūtė, Karolina
Full Text Download
Pages 122
Keywords [eng] major judgements, Court of Justice, legal discourse, metaphors, conceptual metaphor theory, metaphor identification procedure, konceptualiosios metaforos, teisinis diskursas, ES Teisingumo Teismas, MIP metaforos nustatymo metodika, metaforos
Abstract [eng] The present paper focuses on metaphors in a selection of major judgments produced by the Court of Justice of the European Union. The major judgements of the Court of Justice examine the main case-law trends from the year 2022. Due to the limited scope of this paper, and a rigorous procedure employed for linguistic metaphor identification, only the first five subject areas of the first chapter of the major judgements have been chosen. The subject areas are as follows: 1. Values of the European Union. 2. Withdrawal of a Member State from the European Union. 3. Fundamental rights 4. Citizenship of the Union and 5. Institutional Provisions. Following the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007), the metaphors were examined in terms of the establishment of the basic and contextual meanings of the lexical units. By closely examining the five relevant subject areas of the major judgements and applying MIP steps as well as the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), a variety of metaphorical expressions have been identified in the examined text of court judgements. The results reveal that all the first five subtopics of major judgements contained legal metaphors with source domains such as OBJECT, POSSESSION, PLACE, CONTAINER, BUILDING, PERSON and numerous others. The main focus in the paper is on the qualitative analysis of selected metaphors (exemplified by a total of 129 metaphoric expressions) that were examined through the application of CMT and MIP. The study confirms the hypothesis that legal writing is abundant with metaphorical expressions that tend to be conventional and are used to facilitate the understanding of abstract and complex notions in the field of law.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Master thesis
Language English
Publication date 2024