Cognitive processing of legal polysemy: A psycholinguistic analysis of the term ‘Bar’ in Polish legal discourse

Abstract

Legal ambiguity is inherently intertwined with psycholinguistic ambiguity. The term ‘Bar’ in the Polish Law on the Bar carries multiple normative and cognitive meanings, rendering it highly polysemous. The aim of this study is to establish that the polysemantic concept of ‘the Bar’, as used in the Polish legal context, presents interpretative challenges best understood within an integrated framework of legal science, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The objective is to demonstrate that interpretative challenges surrounding the term arise not only from legal drafting practices but also from the cognitive architecture that shapes how legal actors perceive, decode, and operationalise legal linguistic information. Three distinct meanings of the Bar emerge: the professional role of providing legal assistance, the community of lawyers and trainee lawyers, and the self-governing organisational structure. The analysis employs methods of formal-dogmatic interpretation combined with cognitive-semantic framework, including Rosch’s (1975) prototype theory, Langacker’s (2008) cognitive grammar, and Wróblewski’s (1959) theory of legal interpretation. Results demonstrate that the Bar functions as a cognitively structured legal category organised around a prototypical core (the individual advocate) with collective and institutional peripheral extensions. These meanings form context-dependent construals of a unified conceptual base rather than competing definitions. The analysis showed that, from the cognitive grammar perspective, the Bar as a profession of public trust, as a community of lawyers and as an institutional entity has personal, functional, and structural profiles. The study concludes that normative ambiguity should be treated as systematic polysemy, governed by prototype effects and domain activation, and that it requires psycholinguistically informed interpretation to achieve pragmatic clarity.