| Keywords [eng] |
metaphor, source domain, legal discourse, Advocate General, opinion, metaphorical patterns, metafora, šaltinio sritis, teisinis diskursas, generalinis advokatas, nuomonė, metaforiniai modeliai |
| Abstract [eng] |
This paper investigates how Advocates General at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) express metaphors in their opinions regarding abstract legal concepts specifically those found in EU asylum and migration law based on source domains. The opinions of the Advocates General have no legally-binding force; however, they do function as an important legal recommendation. As such, the paper is grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory and further works on metaphor as well as metaphor identification procedure, and metaphorical patterns along with the scenario approach. Additionally, the paper uses AntConc software for Corpus Analysis of twelve CJEU opinions written by six different Advocates General on issues pertaining to EU asylum and migration policy written between 2013 and 2025. From the twelve CJEU opinions, a total of 193 metaphorical expressions were found. These metaphorical expressions represented approximately 31 % percent of the 610 examples that were analyzed. Five primary source domains were identified, which were OBJECT, CONTAINER, SPACE, CONFLICT, and SPORT. Of the five identified source domains, OBJECT was the most productive source domain for metaphorical expression and accounted for 30.57 % of all metaphors. This result supports prior research findings. Notably absent from the Advocates General opinions were metaphorical representations of migration. Migration was instead addressed in the opinions of the Advocates General through abstraction of migration into abstract legal categories, for example rights, cases and obligations. Furthermore, references to either migrants or migration were not made in the opinions of the Advocates General. The lack of reference to migrants or migration through metaphorical representation may reflect the institutional genre of the opinion. Future research could expand the sample size of the corpus by examining additional opinions of Advocate Generals across multiple legal areas and time frames. Furthermore, future research may examine how other forms of discourse, for example public discourse differ or are similar when expressing metaphors for migration in order to demonstrate increased variety. |
