MODALITY IN PAKISTANI SUPREME COURT LEGAL JUDGMENTS: A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS
Keywords:
Criminal Judgments, Deontic Modality, Epistemic Modality, Legal Discourse, Pakistani Supreme Court, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)Abstract
Judicial language is an effective interpersonal tool that judges use to create authority, impose obligations, and establish epistemic certainty. Though it has been of immense importance, modality in Pakistani Supreme Court criminal judgments is barely tapped. This research uses Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory to analyze the use of modals as interpersonal resources in five criminal judgments issued by the Supreme Court of Pakistan from 2020 to 2025. The analysis involves the identification, the classification and the interpretation of modal expressions by type (modalisation vs modulation), value (high, median, low), and orientation (subjective, objective, explicit, implicit). Results show that the distribution is genre-sensitive: obligation predominates in the dispositional sections (with high value obligation markers: shall, must), leading to the creation of binding directives and institutional authority; conversely, the mode of modalisation is found in the evidential reasoning sections, for the purpose of building evidential certainty and caution. This makes a contribution to the field of legal linguistics and SFL theory by examining how modality enacts institutional power in Pakistani Supreme Court criminal judgments.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Tehreem Fatima Rabbani, Iqra Sharif, Dr. Hafiz Muhammad Qasim (Author)
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