The Role of Personifying Metaphors in English and Romanian Legal Texts

This paper attempts to carry out an analysis of metaphors in a corpus of legal documents, within the theoretical framework of the cognitive metaphor theory as conceived by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). There is a notable use of conceptual metaphors and framings in the law we live by which, undoubtedly, have a major impact on the way millions of people in the world act and react in their attempt of decoding legal messages. Since metaphors are basically cognitive constructs, their meaning can be grasped only through a process of transfer of significance from a source domain to a target one, leading thus, to an interpretation of the legal discourse.