Legal stylistics, as one of the approaches in legal linguistics, can play an effective role in enhancing the quality of legal texts and facilitating the fair implementation of laws. This study aims to examine the relationship between verbal style and law enforceability by analyzing the types of processes present in Iranian legal texts and determining the impact of verbal choices on the clarity and executive power of laws. The research hypothesis posits that a high frequency of material and relational processes in legal texts indicates greater strength and enforceability of the law. To this end, four legal corpora (Commercial Law, Press Law, Child and Adolescent Law, and Civil-Criminal Provisions) were examined within the framework of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) Systemic Functional Theory. The research corpus comprised 120 pages (30 pages from each corpus), from which six types of processes (material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential) were extracted and their frequencies calculated through quantitative and qualitative content analysis. For a more objective evaluation, readability indices including average sentence length, technical vocabulary density, and the ratio of verbs to verbal phrases were measured. The results showed that material processes (36-41%) and relational processes (33-41%) had the highest frequency across all four corpora. Civil-Criminal laws with 270 processes and Child and Adolescent laws with 155 processes demonstrated the highest and lowest verbal density, respectively. The average sentence length in Civil-Criminal laws (28.4 words) was higher than in other laws. The ratio of verbal phrases to verbs in all texts was calculated at approximately 3:1, indicating high structural complexity. The high frequency of verbal processes in Civil-Criminal laws (16%) compared to Child and Adolescent laws (4%) suggests that opportunities for defense and objection are greater in the former. Moreover, the predominance of mental and behavioral processes (21%) in Child and Adolescent laws indicates the more abstract nature of these laws, which may lead to ambiguity in interpretation and implementation. The findings demonstrate the necessity of revising the writing style of Child and Adolescent and Press laws, with emphasis on concretizing concepts through increasing material processes and reducing structural complexity.
