Metaphors for legal terms concerning vulnerable people

Abstract

This study takes a cognitive view of metaphor to investigate the terms designating vulnerable people used in two legal languages, namely English as used in the European Union and Mandarin Chinese. We applied a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor to explore the implicit connotations of the terms identifying different groups of vulnerable people (e.g., minors, disabled people, victims of human trafficking). The findings show that even when appearing in legal texts, many of the key terms for these groups are not objective, nor are they unbiased and detached from our subjective and bodily experience of the world. When these terms are connoted, they tend to have negative connotations, raising concerns about their social implications. This study highlights the entailments of embodiment theories for terminology and proposes that the identification of groups of vulnerable people is a social product motivated by unconscious relations of power rather than relations of assistance and reciprocity.