Pieniążek Marcin, Paul Ricoeur’s concept of metaphor and its application in the analysis of the legal text

The problem of the metaphor and its role in understanding legal texts is not an alien issue in the Polish jurisprudence . Even the representatives of the dogmatic – legal fields, as well as judges, pay attention to the practical significance of metaphors in legislation and in case law – both in the courts of common jurisdiction as well as in the Constitutional Tribunal . What is more, the linguists take a reflection on the theory of speech acts in the context of legal language, taking into account the issues concerning the metaphor . The translators of the Polish legal texts indicate, among the many factors influencing the quality of the translation, ambiguous and equivocal metaphorical expressions .

Accordingly, this article is not intended to present the problem of metaphorization (and symbolization) of the legal language and metalanguage, but it rather includes the proposal of a theoretical tool for analysing the perceived phenomenon. For the record, it should be recalled that...