METAFORINIS RAIŠKOS BŪDAS ADMINISTRACINĖJE LIETUVIŲ KALBOJE
METAPHORICAL WAY OF EXPRESSION IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE

Summary/Abstract: Cognitive linguists expanded the traditional concept of artistic metaphor, proving that metaphorical thinking and speaking are the key element of world perception. The study of metaphors enhances our understanding about how people get to know the surrounding world, what they associate its phenomena with and what features of those phenomena they observe. The aim of the article is to investigate the metaphorical means of expression in the administrative Lithuanian language and to compare their peculiar features in the documents drawn up in Lithuania and the translated European Union (EU) documents. The sources of the study are the legal acts and other documents published in the Register of Legal Acts and the translations of documents into Lithuanian made public on the portal of the EU law Eur-lex. The analysis of the language usage in administrative texts revealed the following tendencies of using the means of metaphorical expression: the use of artistic metaphors in the administrative language is limited by the specificity of the sphere under analysis as figurativeness is considered an undesirable feature, and the linguistic metaphors in use have already become the clichéd means of expression. The comparison of the documents produced in Lithuania and the translated EU documents shows that the latter include more metaphors but the frequency of their use also depends on the document genre. Metaphors are more widespread in freer document genres whose expression is closer to the publicistic style (e.g., report, communication, notification, recommendation, opinion, white paper, green paper, opinion of advocates general, etc.). A similar tendency is also noticed in Lithuanian documents; most means of metaphorical expression were found in court documents.

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