Approaches to Legal Metaphor from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Simina BADEA 
Assoc. Prof., PhD.
University of Craiova, Faculty of Law
E-mail: siminabadea@yahoo.com

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4046-6078
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59277/CSNPISSH.2025.02

Copyright (c) 2025.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Published on December 28, 2025

Abstract
Falling within the functionalist tradition, according to which language is shaped and even bears certain constraints from the perspective of the functions it performs and a variety of psychological, biological, historical, sociocultural or environmental factors, cognitive linguistics develops within the anthropocentric paradigm and its fundamental principle concerns the relationship between language and cognition, the latter being closely connected with the process of knowledge and its result. It is also based on the experience we have through the perception of the surrounding world and the way we conceptualize it. In cognitive linguistics, metaphor occupies a privileged place, being detached, however, from its status as a figure of speech and reconstructing a model of thought, a conceptual correspondence between a source domain and a target domain. Legal metaphor, by which we understand the metaphor in the field of law, becomes a means of systematisation and conceptual construction that facilitates communication among specialists and enables the integration of an imaginative loan into a conceptual circuit. Legal metaphor is, above all, a way of thinking, a means of producing knowledge.

Keyword
cognitive linguistics, legal metaphor, specialised metaphor, conceptualisation, metaphor of the tree

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