The English Supreme Court vs Boris Johnson: legal metaphors for a constitutional crisis

Abstract

Legal metaphors are intrinsic to judicial reasoning: courts need onto-logical metaphors to establish the law as a powerful reality in the public uncon-scious; they are hackneyed metaphorical projections peculiar to legal discourse automatically and unsubconsciously deployed to convey the authoritativeness of the law to its subjects􀀌 At the same time, ordinary texts such as news articles, op- eds and editorials deploy a series of poetic, emotional metaphors that are key to disseminate judicial decisions, and which have an enormous impact on societal perceptions, symbols and interpretations of legal rulings􀀌 Our study examines the British constitutional crisis in the summer of 2019 and the Supreme Court ruling that ensued􀀌 The text of that ruling, plus a 20- thousand- word ad hoc sub-corpus containing a series of columns and editorials discussing the aftermath of the ruling constitute the corpora used􀀌 A previous study on lexical frequencies is undertaken to provide a first approach to the patterns of conceptualization of the metaphors describing the constitutional crisis, and mainly focusing upon emotion- free technolects and metaphorical clichés􀀌 Secondly, an automatic pro-cessing with Lingmotif (Moreno Ortiz, 2017), is deployed to more accurately establish the emotional (positive and negative) polarities in the texts and spot the emotional intensity in the different metaphorical areas􀀌 A final categorization of the source and target domains as discourse (power) and poetic (sentiment) met-aphors in either subcorpus within the framework of Appraisal Theory is made􀀌 Overall, our results must show how discourse metaphors establishing the author-ity of the Supreme Court are predominant in the ruling, while emotion-l aden, poetic metaphors are common in newspaper articles, as sentimental responses to such decisions