JUDICIAL PERFORMATIVES IN SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENTS: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF DECLARATIVE AND DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACTS

Abstract

This corpus-based study aims to identify and analyze the linguistic cues of authority of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, by examining two related forms of performative speech acts, declaratives and directives, drawing on the text of judicial judgments as corpus data. The study utilizes a significant amount of text for this analysis, as the corpus of judgments comprises a token size of 0.24 million, based on the text of 80 decisions from the year 2025. The study used a rule-based computational approach in Python with spaCy, applying regular expressions to systematically extract declarative and directive performative expressions. The findings showed a significantly higher number of directive speech acts, such as judicial orders and directions, than declarative expressions, which were commonly used for pronouncements conferring legal status or outcomes in the corpus under analysis. Specifically, the study identified roughly 757 directive instances, compared to 450 declarations across the corpus. This asymmetrical division indicates that directives are more widely used in decisions directing the relevant agencies to implement justice. Nevertheless, both categories serve crucial judicial functions: embedding linguistic cues of authority in the Supreme Court's text as directive functions that impose obligations and compel action, while declarative acts formally determine status as legal outcomes. There are some limitations to the study, as it focuses on only two performative types relevant to orders and uses a machine-based approach with regular expressions to extract expressions of both performatives. The study highlights the importance of performative utterances in judgments, particularly related to orders that advanced the reader’s understanding of how judicial discourse operationalized legal decisions.