Abstract
The study deals with the question whether and how German-speaking and Italian jurists use metaphors in their academic writings and whether we can find intercultural similarities and differences in such a use. After a general description of the text genre "scientific article", which was chosen for the empirical analysis, peculiarities of the juridical article are discussed; an introduction of the most important theories of metaphor, among which Lakoff and Johnson's one, is followed by a review of various positions on the role of metaphor in languages for special purposes within German-speaking and Italian scholars of this field, as well as to a review of existing works on metaphors in juridical texts. After this theoretical part, the empirical analysis conducted on a text-corpus shows a number of important functions, some of which had not been analysed yet, that metaphors play on the semantic, the textual (text-organisational and argumentative) and the discoursive level. The analysis reveals a general parallelism between the German-speaking and the Italian juridical scientific community, in that both use the same basic conceptual metaphors; diversity and peculiarity emerge thereby in the different aspects which are stressed by the different authors. According to these findings the thesis that metaphors are mere ornaments or 'dangerous' for languages for special purposes must be rejected; the study also reveals the central role of the scientific author in shaping the relationship with the reader, who can be guided, conducted and helped to find his way through the text and the authors' theses also by means of metaphors.