Metaphor and metonymy in legal texts

Abstract: Legal discourse has been studied so far by numerous linguists and legal experts. Linguistic studies have predominantly focused on stylistic elements of the legal register, such as morphological and syntactic features. Until recently the figurative nature of legal register and its great potential were completely disregarded by linguists. While legal experts realised the importance and power of metaphor and metonymy decades ago, linguists have been slow to follow. The aim of this paper is a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors and metonymies in the legislation systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UK and the US. The metaphors and metonymies used in the analysis are collected from Higher Education Acts from these three countries.