Abstract This article examines how evidential authority is textually constructed in contemporary Saudi legal judgments. Instead of treating evidentiality as a narrowly grammatical category, it develops a discourse-level account of how Arabic legal judgments encode source, reliability, institutional standing, and normative force through citation, attribution, and genre sequencing. The corpus comprises Volume 2 of the Collection of Judicial Rulings 1435 H, including 90 case entries in 512-pages published by the Ministry of Justice, Saudi Arabia. Eighty-four complete first-instance rulings were available for structural analysis. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and independently checked manual coding, the study proposes a five-tier Intertextual Authority Chain (IAC): Prophetic hadith, classical fiqh maxims, state statutes, institutional or expert reports, and testimonial statements. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate that these sources are functionally differentiated: testimony constructs the factual record, institutional reports corroborate or qualify disputed facts, statutes anchor procedure and jurisdiction, and fiqh maxims frequently operate to convert evidential uncertainty into a legally actionable conclusion. The study contributes to evidentiality research and Arabic legal discourse analysis by offering a replicable framework for comparing the textual distribution of sacred, juristic, statutory, administrative, and testimonial authority in Islamic legal writing.
Abstract This study investigates the functions respect , respectful and respectfully in Nigerian Supreme Court lead and dissenting judgments, to explore the contextual nuances of the conventional politeness markers in written appellate adjudication. Drawing on a corpus of 122 judgments, the study examines the frequency, formal realisations, patterns of use and pragmatic functions of these forms across lead and dissenting judgments. The findings show that respect and its two other variants occur more frequently in dissenting judgments, although their distribution varies across individual dissents. The prepositional phrase, with respect , is the most frequent formal pattern in both genres. Across contexts involving agreement or disagreement with lower court judges, fellow judges, and litigants’ counsel, the forms serve as resources for mitigating face threat, framing aggravated disagreement and marking judicial identity. The study argues that respect , respectful and respectfully are not merely conventional markers of deference; rather, their pragmatic functions emerge from the interaction between linguistic form, discourse context, institutional relationships and the argumentative activity in which they occur.
Abstract This study examines the semantic and functional variability of the modal verb shall in the Tanzanian Bilingual Constitution of 1977, as revised in 2005, with particular focus on its English usage and Kiswahili realisations. Although traditionally associated with legal obligation, shall has been widely criticised in legal linguistics for its semantic ambiguity and functional instability. Using a semantic-pragmatic and comparative translation approach informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics and legal pragmatics, the study analyses 705 occurrences of shall , from which 60 clauses were functionally classified, and 28 bilingual parallel clauses were selected for detailed analysis. The findings reveal that shall performs multiple constitutional functions, including constitutive or existential commands, deontic obligations, prohibitions, procedural futurity, and declarative constitutional identity. While obligation remains dominant, significant functional expansion toward futurity and declarative meaning is observed. The study further shows that Kiswahili lacks a direct equivalent of shall , leading to systematic translation strategies involving morphological futurity (ta-), existential constructions (kutakuwa na), lexical obligation markers (wajibu, lazima), and prohibition markers (ni marufuku). These strategies indicate that legal translation operates as a process of functional reconstruction rather than linguistic equivalence. The study concludes that constitutional meaning in Tanzania is dynamically constructed through the interaction of grammatical structure, institutional authority, and bilingual translation practices. It contributes to legal linguistics, translation studies, and African multilingual constitutional scholarship by demonstrating that legal modality in postcolonial bilingual systems is contextually distributed rather than semantically fixed.
Abstract This conversation analytic study aimed to clarify the witness’s resistance as a social practice during the congressional hearing of TikTok’s CEO in March 2023 as a means of negotiating their public image. The analysis indicated that the committee members deprived the witness of the opportunity to contradict their critique, thus implying that the witness accepted it. However, by invoking the lawmakers’ institutional responsibility to hear from the witness through requesting a foreclosed sequential slot to respond, the witness could make publicly visible that his voice was “getting muted.” This resistance highlights the fact that the committee’s attitudes are more inclined to create public spectacles than to fulfill their responsibilities. Considering that congressional hearings are part of the legal system in that the witness’s words and behavior contribute to the committee’s shaping of legislation, even when the hearing is not specifically intended to address legislation, the committee’s failure to pursue its ostensible information-gathering purposes may have consequences beyond the immediate interaction. Therefore, the findings suggest that “proper understanding” of media discourse developed through congressional hearings would encompass criticizing a morally questionable way of collecting information from the witness.
Abstract Legal English secures precision through dense qualificational syntax, and the evaluation of machine-translated legal texts often reads lower structural complexity as weaker legal precision. Whether formal simplification actually entails the loss of legally relevant relations has rarely been tested. This study examines the question in 57 Chinese-language Hong Kong judgments, comparing their official English translations with DeepSeek-V3.2 and ChatGPT output generated under a minimal prompt. Relative to the official translations, both model translations are shorter, lexically denser and markedly lower in subordination and complex nominal density. Their higher all-word lexical diversity lies in function words and has no counterpart in content words. A prespecified relation-level analysis then traced 192 source instances of qualification and scope marking into all three versions. Each version preserved the traced relations in over 97 % of its evaluable renderings, 98.06 % when the three versions are pooled. Of the eleven shifts, two occur in the official translations, five in DeepSeek and four in ChatGPT. The judgments with the greatest complex nominal divergence showed no larger model excess of shifts. The shifts that altered the reading of a judgment included changes in quantifier force, party coverage, attribution and restrictive scope, and the aggregate profile did not identify where they occurred. The findings separate formal simplification from relational loss. Legal precision in translated judgments is better evaluated through relational fidelity than through structural density, while corpus profiles remain appropriate for describing how production conditions package legal meaning.
