Forensic linguistics

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Forensic linguistics is the name given to a number of sub-disciplines within applied linguistics, and which relate to the interface between language, the law and crime.

The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse but research occurs in the following areas.

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[edit] The language of the legal texts

This area relates to the transformative effect of Norman French and Ecclesiastic Latin on the development of the English common law, and the evolution of the legal argot associated with it. It can also refer to the ongoing attempts at reforming legal language.

[edit] The language of legal processes

This area would examine language as it is used in cross-examination, evidence presentation, judge's direction, summing up to the jury, police cautions, 'police talk', interview techniques, the questioning process in court and in other areas such as police interviews, amongst other things.

[edit] The provision of linguistic evidence

Linguists have provided evidence in:

  • trademark disputes
  • disputes of meaning and use
  • identifying the author of anonymous texts (such as threat letters)
  • identifying cases of plagiarism
  • tracing the ethnic origins of asylum seekers

and a number of other areas. Some areas are more controversial than others. The identification of whether a given individual said or wrote something relies on analysis of their idiolect or particular patterns of language use (vocabulary, collocations, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etc.). The idiolect is a theoretical construct based on the idea that there is linguistic variation at the group level and hence there may also be linguistic variation at the individual level. As the well-respected variationist William Labov pointed out thirty years ago, there is no empirical evidence for the idiolect, and subsequently, as summarized by Malcolm Coulthard, no empirical evidence for the idiolect in written language has yet been presented. It is important for forensic linguistics to apply linguistic constructs accurately, and recognize when a linguistic construct is empirically well-founded or not.

[edit] Examples

Forensic linguists have given expert evidence in cases such as the Murder of Danielle Jones posthumous appeal against the conviction of Derek Bentley and the identification of Theodore Kaczynski as the so-called "Unabomber". During the appeal against the conviction of the Bridgewater Four, linguist Malcolm Coulthard examined the written confession of Patrick Molloy, one of the convicts — a confession which he had retracted immediately — and a written record of an interview which the police claimed had taken place immediately before the confession was dictated. Molloy denied that the interview had ever taken place, and the analysis indicated that the answers in the interview were not consistent with the questions being asked. Coulthard came to the conclusion that the interview had been fabricated by police. As other evidence of police corruption became known, the conviction against the Bridgewater Four was quashed before Coulthard could produce his evidence. Additionally, in an Australian case reported by Eagleson, a "farewell letter" had apparently been written by a woman prior to her disappearance. The letter was compared with a sample of her previous writing and that of her husband. Eagleson came to the conclusion that the letter had been written by the husband of the missing woman, who subsequently confessed to having written it and to having killed his wife. The features analysed included sentence breaks, marked themes, and deletion of prepositions.[1]

[edit] Derek Bentley

Forensic linguistics contributed significantly to the overturning of Derek Bentley's conviction for murder in 1998. Nineteen-year-old Bentley was hanged in 1952 for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles; the fatal shot had been fired by Bentley's sixteen-year-old friend, Christopher Craig, when Bentley was already in police custody. Bentley, who had a mental age of eleven and was functionally illiterate, was convicted partly on the basis of his statement to police, allegedly transcribed verbatim from a spoken monologue. Linguist Malcolm Coulthard examined the text when the case was reopened, and found a number of features which indicated police co-authorship, and which suggested that at least part of the statement resulted from questions and answers, as Bentley claimed, and was not, as police claimed, a "verbatim record of dictated monologue".[2] One such feature was the use of the word "then", which Coulthard and his colleague David Woolls found to be the eighth most frequently-occurring word in Bentley's text, as compared with the 58th most frequent word in spoken English, and the 83rd most frequent word in English in general (according to the 1.5-million-word Bank of English corpus they were using). Feeling that the use of that word could be expected to be higher than average in witness statements (which generally report a sequence of events and show concern for accuracy about time), Coulthard compiled two corpora, one of witness statements and one of police statements. The word "then" occurred once every 930 words in the former but once every 78 words in the latter, compared with the Bank of English corpus where it occurred once every 500 words, and Bentley's text where it occurred once every 53 words. This led Coulthard to focus more on the use of the word "then". He noted the frequent post-positioning of temporal (time-related) "then" after the grammatical subject ("I then" rather than "then I"), which occurred seven times in the 582-word text. The Bank of English spoken corpus showed "then I" to be ten times as frequent as "I then", the latter occurring only once every 165,000 words. That structure did not occur at all in Coulthard's corpus of witness statements, but occurred once every 119 words in the corpus of police statements. These features, combined with many others, contributed to a successful argument that the Bentley "confession" was, in part, the written work of police officers, and not simply a word-for-word transcript of Bentley's spoken statement as the police alleged.

[edit] The "Unabomber"

In the case of Theodore Kaczynski, who was eventually convicted of being the "Unabomber", family members recognized his writing style from the published 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), and notified the authorities. FBI agents searching Kaczynski's hut found a 300-word manuscript written by Kaczynski, but not published anywhere. An analysis produced by English professor Donald Foster collaborating with an FBI agent identified several lexical items and phrases common to the two documents. Some were more distinctive than others, but the prosecution successfully argued that even the more common words and phrases being used by Kaczynski became distinctive when used in combination with each other. Taking fourteen of the more common items, they searched the web and found three million documents containing one or more of these items, but only sixty-nine with all fourteen items; and the sixty-nine documents were all online versions of the Unabomber Manifesto.[3]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ R. Eagleson (2004): "Forensic analysis of personal written texts: a case study" in J Gibbons (ed.): Language and the Law. London, Longman, pp.362–373.
  2. ^ R.M. Coulthard (2000): "Whose text is it? On the linguistic investigation of authorship", in S. Sarangi and R.M. Coulthard: Discourse and Social Life, London, Longman, pp270–87
  3. ^ R.M. Coulthard & A. Johnson (2007): "An Introduction of Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence" London and New York, Routledge, pp162-3.

[edit] External links

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