A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF HEDGES IN THE JUDGMENTS OF THE SUPREME COURT OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

The present research aims to look at the use of hedges in the judgments of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. This study is two-fold; on one side, it locates the kinds of hedges in the judgments, and on the other, it explores the functions of these hedges. For this purpose, 113 judgments made by the Supreme Court of Pakistan comprising a corpus of 770532 tokens are taken up for the analysis. The corpus linguistic methodology is employed in this study, and a corpus software, LancsBox, is used to analyze the collected corpus. It is found after the data analysis that Pakistani judges use different types of hedges in their judgments, which shows that they try to be more precise in their decisions instead of being uncertain or ambiguous. The data also reveals that hedges serve different functions in the judgments as these can increase or mitigate the impacts of the intensity of the judgments.