Legal Vocabulary Under Scrutiny: A Keyword-Based Analysis of Specialized Language in a Corpus of Iranian Criminal Court Judgments

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran.

2 PhD Candidate in General Linguistics, Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

3 Associate Professor, Department of English Language, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Lorestan University of Lorestan, Khorramabad, Iran.

4 M.A student,, Department of Law, Private Law, Faculty of Humanities, Ayatollah Boroujerdi University, Boroujerd, Iran.

Abstract

This study examines the lexical structure of first instance criminal court rulings in Iran to determine how far their language departs from general usage and what institutional and discursive effects this departure produces. A specialized corpus of approximately eighty five thousand words drawn from written criminal judgments was compiled, preprocessed, and compared with a reference corpus of contemporary Persian containing over thirty eight million words. Lexical distinctiveness was measured through keyness analysis using the Log Likelihood statistic, which yielded the one thousand most overrepresented items. After removing stopwords and analytically irrelevant forms, the remaining items were examined through frequency analysis and qualitative concordance analysis. The results show that positively keyed items cluster around four main domains: criminal acts and attributes, judicial procedures, institutional roles and actors, and punishment related concepts. These items are rare in general Persian but statistically prominent in judicial texts. Concordance analysis indicates that they typically occur in nominalized, impersonal, and citation based structures that frame judicial actions as autonomous, agentless processes. Interpreted through ESP and Critical Discourse Analysis, the findings suggest that such lexical and syntactic patterning reinforces epistemic boundaries between legal experts and lay readers, supports institutional authority, and limits interpretive agency.

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References

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