A Study Of Conceptual Metaphor In Courtroom Discourse

With the development of cognitive linguistics,metaphor is no longer simply regarded as a rhetorical or a linguistic phenomenon,more and more scholars regard metaphor as a basic way of human thinking and cognitive pattern.Legal language is a special style which bears the characteristics of legal specialty.As one kind of human language,legal language is fundamentally metaphorical in nature as well.By focusing on the court scenes,recording the conceptual metaphors which are used in the selected courtroom discourses and choosing the most representative and influential conceptual metaphors among three films The Merchant of Venice,Find Me Guilty,Philadelphia,this thesis takes the trial lines from these three films as the research object and analyzes the features and functions of conceptual metaphors in courtroom discourse.The following findings have been made:(1)Conceptual metaphors in courtroom discourse are mainly composed of WAR metaphor,TIME metaphor and LAW metaphor and so on based on the data the author collected.(2)The functions of conceptual metaphor in courtroom discourse mainly cover the following four functions: rhetorical,linguistic,cognitive and social functions.The study demonstrates that the use of conceptual metaphor is extensive even in the standardized,rigorous and formal legal text.At the same time,it further proves that metaphor is a way of people's cognition,people's daily life and even legal language is inseparable from this metaphorical mode of thinking.