Lexical Choices and Environmental Ideologies: A Corpus Based Eco-Linguistic Analysis of Supreme Court Judgments in Pakistan

Abstract

Environmental ideologies play a pivotal role in shaping institutional responses to nature and sustainability. This study examines how such ideologies are constructed through legal discourse in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, using a corpus-based ecolinguistic approach. A dataset of ten publicly available environmental judgments was compiled and analyzed using AntConc for frequency, collocation, and concordance, with ecologically relevant lexical items identified through the USAS semantic tagger. The analysis, interpreted through Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistic framework, revealed a discourse dominated by anthropocentric and administrative frames. High frequency terms such as “environment,” “pollution,” “land,” and “park” were largely embedded in legal, developmental, and public health contexts. In contrast, ecocentric lexemes like “ecosystem,” “biodiversity,” and “habitat” were entirely absent, highlighting a pattern of lexical erasure. Concordance patterns showed that state institutions and legal authorities are repeatedly positioned as agentive actors, while the environment is constructed as passive and regulated. Rhetorical strategies such as modality, nominalization, and technocratic register further reinforce human-centered governance of nature. These findings demonstrate that judicial language, though aimed at environmental protection, often reaffirms dominant anthropocentric ideologies rather than promoting ecological ethics. This study extends ecolinguistic analysis into the legal domain and emphasizes the ideological role of judicial language in shaping environmental responsibility.