This paper focuses on two legal languages such as the legal English developed by the European Union institutions (Euro English) and the legal Chinese of Mainland China, to study whether the mental representations and the embodied simulation created by the conceptual metaphors for the same Western concept, right, differ in any significant ways. By analysing the data contained in two large corpora, this study has found that, despite the common origin of the concept right in the two legal languages, they conceptualise it in a significantly different fashion. Finally, the findings of this study are read through the theoretical framework proposed for this special issue-hybridity and the Third Space. While it is somewhat straightforward to conceive of Euro English as a hybrid language, owing to the multilingual and supranational setting where it is used, this study has found that the Chinese legal language, too, is a hybrid language exhibiting linguistic features that intersect different belief systems.
Keywords: Chinese legal language; Cognitive equivalence; Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT); Corpus linguistics and big data analysis; Rights and quanli 权利.
© The Author(s) 2021.