Within the framework of the sociocognitive approach to Terminology pioneered by Temmerman (2000) this paper aims at comparing the use of lexical metaphors in a bilingual comparable corpus of criminal judgments in Spanish and Italian.
The objectives of this contrastive study are twofold: on the one hand, to identify differences and similarities in the frequency and typology of some metaphorical expressions used in Spanish and Italian criminal judgments, and, on the other hand, to show the crucial role played by metaphorical thinking in this specific subgenre of judicial texts.
The comparable corpus has approximately 480,000 tokens and is made up by two subcorpora (Spanish and Italian) of judgments delivered by the Supreme Courts in both countries (Tribunal Supremo and Corte di Cassazione).
As far as methodology is concerned, corpus analysis was conducted using version 5 of the WordSmith Tools software. First wordlists of the two subcorpora were used to identify keywords, extracted using two reference corpora. Second, KWIC concordances were run to investigate use and typology in greater detail and infer metaphorical uses from collocational information. By concordancing most of the keywords, the existence of linguistic metaphors that realized particular conceptual metaphors was established. Finally, lexical metaphors were classified according to a number of source and target domains.
The paper applies this methodology to a select group of metaphorical realizations from both corpora, showing the empirical importance of evidence of metaphorical reasoning influencing the lexicon of the two judicial systems.
