Contextual Glosses and Interpretive Alignment in Judicial Texts: A Pragmatic Study of a Nigerian Divorce Judgment

Abstract This study interrogates the role of contextual glosses and shared knowledge in achieving interpretive alignment in judicial discourse, with specific focus on a Nigerian divorce court judgment. It adopts Odebunmi’s Mutual and Contextual Beliefs (MCB) model, complemented by insights from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), to examine how meaning is constructed, negotiated, and stabilised within institutional legal texts. Using a qualitative textual analysis of a selected divorce judgment, the study reveals that judicial communication relies heavily on presupposed shared knowledge among judges, litigants, and legal practitioners to ensure coherence, authority, and interpretive clarity. Findings show that contextual glosses-realised through legal terminologies, lexico-semantic repetition, abbreviations, and syntactic complexity function as pragmatic resources that guide interpretation and minimise ambiguity. The dominance of declarative clauses further reflects the institutional power and non-negotiable nature of judicial pronouncements. The study demonstrates that divorce judgments are not merely applications of legal rules but context-dependent communicative acts shaped by pragmatic reasoning and functional language choices. It concludes that the integration of pragmatic and functional linguistic approaches provides a robust framework for understanding meaning-making processes in Nigerian judicial discourse and contributes to the growing body of legal discourse studies in African contexts. Keywords:   Pragmatics; Judicial discourse; Contextual glosses; Divorce judgments; Nigerian legal texts