Shaping reality through metaphorical patterns in legislative texts on immigr ation: a corpus-assisted approach

This work looks at the role of metaphors in formulating legal policy in a specific case study on immigration policy. Using a corpus of 400.000 words relating to texts drafted between 1999 and 2009 on UK and EU immigration legilslation, the study looks at how metaphors can be identified by adopting corpus linguistic techniques and how they can iinform a descriptive analysis of legislative language The paper argues that the exico- semantic and grammatical patterns produced reveal an underlying discourse related to metaphorical concepts which imply controlling immigration by national border security. Cultural keywords and collocates are investigated, e.g... alien