Children’s Rights through the Lens of Conceptual Metaphor: A Corpus-Based Study of EU Legal Documents in English and Italian

Metaphors have traditionally been viewed as rhetorical devices whose sole aim was to embellish language. However, since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's work (1980), they have come to be understood not only as linguistic phenomena but, more importantly, as cognitive phenomena. As a matter of fact, metaphors enable us to comprehend abstract and complex concepts by relating them to more concrete and familiar ones. This applies not only to general language, but also to specialised domains, including legal language. Despite the growing interest in conceptual metaphors within legal discourse, few studies have examined their use in the European legal context, and even fewer have approached the topic from a cross-linguistic perspective. The present research addresses this gap by identifying conceptual metaphors in European legal documents concerning the rights of the child in two languages, English and Italian, and by comparing the findings between the two languages. The corpus under examination is a parallel corpus comprising the most relevant EU legal and policy instruments on the rights of the child, including those annexed to the 2021 Communication from the European Commission on the EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child and the 2024 Commission Recommendation on Integrated Child Protection Systems, as well as relevant judgments from the European Court of Justice. This corpus was then processed using the corpus management tools SketchEngine and Wmatrix. Conceptual metaphors were first identified in each language separately and then compared to uncover similarities and differences at both the conceptual and linguistic levels.