A Comparative Perspective on Legal Register in Pakistani English

Abstract

The present study investigates linguistic variation of legal register in relation to other special and non-special registers in Pakistani English by applying multidimensional analysis approach introduced by Biber (1988) in his work “Variation across Speech and Writing”. In order to describe a register, a comparative register perspective yields baseline data to comprehend the linguistic properties of an individual register. Comparative studies show that there are significant linguistic differences among registers, known as the patterns of register variation. Thus the current study aims to reveal differences and similarities among legal register and other registers in Pakistani context. The corpus of the study includes legal register with eight legal genres and about two million words whereas mean dimension scores of other registers have been taken from Ahmad and Mahmood, 2015; Hussain, Mahmood and Azher, 2016; Alvi, Mehmood and Rasool, 2016.  The results show that legal register and editorials are significantly different from each other along dimension 1,3,4,5 whereas legal register and press reportage are found statistically significantly different along all five dimensions. As regards comparison of legal register and non-special registers, the results reveal highly significant difference between them. It indicates that legal register has specific lexico-grammatical features which distinguish it from other registers. Difference among registers might be due to their different goals, norms and audience. It reveals that functional interpretations on the basis of texts regardless of register variation are inadequate.