LEXICAL DENSITY IN PAKISTANI SUPREME COURT JUDGMENTS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY USING ANTCONC AND MAT WITHIN A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS FRAMEWORK

Abstract

In this study, the approach taken is corpus-based method and the theory used is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which is related to the study of lexical density in Supreme Court judgments of Pakistan. The main purpose is to see how the meaning is created in legal texts by the choice of words, and to quantify the amount of informational compression in the legal language. A set of 25 Supreme Court decisions was collected, with 6,535-word types and 69,626 tokens. The data have been processed in the MAT (Part-of-Speech tagging) and AntConc (frequency and corpus analysis). The result shows that lexical density of Pakistani judicial language is 58.9%, which is relatively high and shows that there is a high level of informational compression in the Pakistani judicial language. The nominalization of legal language is evident from the POS analysis; nouns are followed by verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In the frequency analysis, it is also clear that the Supreme Court judgment uses specific legal terms like court, petitioner, evidence and jurisdiction, indicating the institutional and procedural character of Supreme Court decisions. From the results, it can be concluded that the type of legal discourse is very abstract, formal, and lexically dense, and its meaning is built mainly by means of nominalization and specialized vocabulary. These linguistic characteristics enhance the accuracy and authority of judicial writing but should not diminish the understanding of non-specialist readers. The study is in support of the theoretical claims of Systemic Functional Linguistics, specifically the idea of lexical density in written institutional discourse of M. A. K. Halliday. It also proves the ability of corpus-based tools to analyze legal language. In a broad sense, the researchers are advancing the field of corpus linguistics and legal discourse analysis with empirical data on Pakistani Supreme Court decisions, and by offering a window into the complexity of legal discourse. The abstracts of the legal writings of Pakistani Supreme Court judgments were used in this study to investigate lexical density in legal discourse. In this study, the CSL was used to analyze lexical density of the legal writings of Pakistani Supreme Court judgments.