DOI: 10.31703/glr.2021(VI-II).08 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/glr.2021(VI-II).08 p-ISSN: 2663-3299 e-ISSN: 2663-3841 L-ISSN: 2663-3299 Vol. VI, No. II (Spring 2021) Pages: 63– 77 Citation: Usmani, S. H. A., & Afsar, A. (2021). Transitivity Analysis of Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908: A Corpus-Based Study. Global Language Review, VI(II), 63-77. https://doi.org/10.31703/glr.2021(VI-II).08 Transitivity Analysis of Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908: A Corpus-Based Study Saadat Hasan Akhtar Usmani * Ayaz Afsar † Abstract The language of law is complex and needs to be investigated to facilitate its easy understanding. The present study addresses this need by analyzing a mini-corpus comprising two short texts taken from Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908 and the U.K.'s Civil Procedure Rules 1998 with Halliday's ideational metafunction, which is suited for analyzing procedural texts (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The study identified the transitivity patterns in the mini corpus. The findings showed simpler construction of processes in the U.K. civil procedure text sample as compared to Pakistan's Civil Procedure text sample, whereas the analysis showed a similar complex construction of nominal phrases in both texts. The study is expected to contribute toward an easy understanding of legal language. It is also hoped that this study will promote further research in this important area with pedagogical implications. Key Words: Corpus Analysis, Ideational Metafunction, Legal Language, Legislative Drafting, Linguistic Complexity, Systemic Functional Linguistics Introduction Legal language is complex because it uses complex linguistic structures and multiple qualifications for achieving clarity and comprehensiveness (El- Farahaty, 2015; Bhatia, 1993, 2003, 2004). That is the reason that complexity in legal language has been researched extensively. For example, Bhatia (1993, 2010) investigated the use of subordinate clauses in order to facilitate the understanding of legislative provisions. Cooper (2011) identified the ambiguity caused by the excessive use of the modal verb ‘shall’ in legislation. Some research in legal language has been carried out in the Pakistani context, too. For example, the stylistic and move analysis of plaints for recovery of finance (Jabeen, 2012), genre analysis of Pakistani Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961 (Usmani, 2014), and stylistic analysis of Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961 (Ahmad, Nadeem, * PhD Scholar, Department of English, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan. Email: saadathausmani@gmail.com † Vice President Academics, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan. Khan, & Ahmad, 2015). These studies provide a foundation for the present study. As the complexity in legal language presents challenges for easy understanding of the legislative texts (Bhatia, 2004), and the fact that research on legal language in the Pakistani context is still limited, we aimed to carry out a comparative linguistic analysis of the legal language used in Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908 (henceforth CPC) and U.K.'s Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (henceforth CPR). For this purpose, we employed Halliday's ideational metafunction. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the ideational metafunction is used to identify the use of language in expressing the actions and events. Hence, it is well suited for investigating the procedural texts (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004).