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.
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