A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MODAL VERB USAGE IN HIGH COURTS VERDICTS OF PAKISTAN: A PRAGMATIC EXPLORATION OF LEGAL MODALITY

Abstract

            Modality is an essential phenomenon in linguistics to offer an intuition into how language articulates obligation, necessity, possibility, prediction, permission, and additional linked concepts. It plays a vital role in determining the meaningful utterances, especially by demonstrating the interlocutor’s approaches to the truth of an intention or the repetitiveness of an event. Legal discourse is different in terms of technical language usage from every day’s common speech. Legislative statements are authoritative in nature as they create, modify, construct, interpret, and are responsible for law enforcement (Tiersma, 1999). The prime interest of this study is to provide the first ever corpus-based pragmatic profile of modal verbs’ usage in the High courts of Pakistan. The study is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), proposed by Halliday. This study uses SFL to construe how modal verbs contribute to the persuasive and authoritative forces of judgments. Legal verdicts from the four high courts of Pakistan are assisted as the data for the present study. The verdicts were extracted from the official web sites of Lahore, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan’s high courts. The data was prepared and POS tagging for automatic annotation was done by AntConc version 4.3.1.0. The findings are based on the collocational analysis of the modal verbs.  It is evident from the findings that Pakistani legal discourse is highly dogmatic and deontic in expression.