What do we do with (to) laws and what do laws do to us

This paper analyses metaphorical collocations of the terms law in enTenTen20, Gesetz in deTenTen20 and zakon in hrwac 2.2. from a contrastive corpus-based perspective. The hypothesis states that metaphorical collocations operate on the basis of conceptual metaphors that are culturally universal, at least as far as the (legal) languages analysed for the purpose of this paper are concerned. By combining a corpus-based and a cognitive linguistic perspective, the paper attempts to confirm this hypothesis, suggesting that legal systems, albeit resorting to different sources of law, tend to follow the same reasoning in unrelated legal cultures and the contrastively investigated collocates therefore represent near equivalents. Finally, a corpus-based approach reveals semantically related collocates, which in turn assist in the detection of a collocational range and, ultimately, of the conceptual level of these metaphorical word combinations.