Research On The Rational Use Of The Legal Metaphors In Marriage Judgement

Human’s understanding of metaphor has gone through a process from rhetoric to poetics and then into cognitive psychology.We often use metaphors as a bridge to "link" the understanding of familiar,specific things（source domain）to strange,abstract things（target domain）,and then use this to talk or think about the latter.This article is based on several marriage verdicts from the three ancient verdict collections of "A and B Verdicts","A New Word in Prison Breaking" and "Yu Chenglong’s Judgment",typical cases of the Republic of China,and several marriage verdict documents from the Chinese Judgment Documents Network.It reviews the use of legal metaphors in both Chinese traditional and modern periods,analyzes the types and characteristics of legal metaphors in marriage judgment documents,and reveals the reasons behind the use of legal metaphors and its value orientation,emotional guidance and concept renewal.The dissertation first reviews the development of metaphorics at home and abroad,and reviews and analyzes the new developments in metaphor research in the field of law.After that,using the marriage referee documents from the Chinese referee document network as a corpus to study the structure,classification and characteristics of legal metaphors in the referee documents.Based on these,the author analyzes the social and cultural context which these metaphors appear in marriage judgment rely on and discusses the functions of legal metaphors in the following part.After in-depth analysis,this article finally draws the following conclusions: 1.Structurally,legal metaphors in adjudicative documents generally have origin,target and metaphors,and the fields involved in origin are relatively diverse.2.Compared with the laws in other language forms,legal metaphors in judicial documents mostly appear in the part of "the opinion of the court",but rarely appear in the narrative part of the case.The producers of the judgment documents are more cautious in using the metaphors.3.The characteristics of legal language determine the difference between legal metaphors in judgment documents and legal metaphors in general language variants.Because legal metaphors reflect the social and cultural environment which they belong in,different social models and cultural contexts are the source of the unique characteristics of legal metaphors in judicial documents.4.The functions of legal metaphors in marriage judgment documents mainly include the functions of constructing new concepts,interpretation and inference.Based on the above analysis,this article proposes how to make the use of legal metaphors to achieve consensus.First of all,make a value judgment to avoid the false guidance caused by the blind use of legal metaphors.Secondly,rely on the context to establish an equal communication foundation for the speaker and the audience.Finally,it is necessary to pay attention to the field of the use of metaphors,and to explain the fields of unfamiliar professions by the familiar surroundings of the public,which will make difficult legal issues more understandable.