Cultural Schemas in Legal Language: A Corpus-Based Exploration of the Punjab Laws

Abstract

  Cultural Linguistics (CL) provides a lens to view knowledge through cultural patterns and frameworks. Although the legal language is often considered an island where encroachments of culture are most of the time restricted due to the technical nature of the language, it still invites new insights and angles to study interlocutory processes and actions. This study fills that space and considers legal language as a product of cultural schemas. Pakistani legal code system owes a great deal to the English language and English terminology due to the long stretched past under the colonial rule of the Britons. Despite having an over-stretched dependence upon the English language, cultural schemas have always been there and they make up a good chunk of legal code that can be labeled as representative of national culture. Cultural schemas in legal language provide a basis for shared knowledge of the community. This knowledge provides a common ground for interaction among speakers of the community. To study cultural schemas in the legal code, a corpus of Punjab laws has been designed, and by using certain tools and mechanisms, a list of culturally established terms is taken from the corpus. These terms are analyzed against the cultural cognition theory and in particular cultural schemas proposed under the head of cognition theory by Sharifian (2017). The study concludes with the interdependence of culture, language, and law. Cultural schemas are instantiated through language and represent encyclopedic and pragmatic meanings embodied in the legal texts.