Metafora rašytiniame akademiniame teisės diskurse: gretinamasis tyrimas

The dissertation presents a contrastive corpus-driven study of metaphor in written academic legal discourse in English and Lithuanian. The aim of the study is to analyse law-related metaphors in research articles on criminal law, criminology and criminal justice in English and Lithuanian in terms of the main source domains and identify language-specific trends of metaphoricity. Alongside, an attempt is made to examine their linguistic expression focusing on lexical variation in each language and account for language-specific similarities and differences. The study relies on data retrieved from corpora which were designed for this study and which consist of research articles on criminal law, criminology and criminal justice collected from peer-reviewed journals. The English corpus consists of 381,894 words and the Lithuanian corpus consists of 383,517 words. Metaphors are retrieved from corpora by applying corpus tools. This study tackles metaphors which are realised in language in the form of metaphorical patterns which consist of law-related nouns as target domain lexemes and metaphorically used lexemes instantiating different source domains. This study adopts combined research methodology: it follows the corpus-driven approach to metaphor research, it relies on the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor, metaphorical pattern analysis (MPA) (Stefanowitsch 2004, 2006) and the principles of MIP(VU) (Steen et al. 2010). The study has applied the use of statistical tests, namely, the calculation of the Log Likelihood (Rayson 2004), whereas lexical variation of metaphor was determined by measuring the metaphorical type-token ratio (mTTR)