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Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics applies linguistic knowledge and methods to legal contexts. It examines language evidence to solve crimes or legal disputes. Key areas of study include legal texts, legal processes like court examinations, and forensic text types like ransom notes, suicide letters, and social media posts. Linguistic evidence is used in legal proceedings for tasks like author identification, forensic stylistics, forensic phonetics, and discourse analysis.

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Ingrida Girdziušaitė
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136 views3 pages

Forensic Linguistics

Forensic linguistics applies linguistic knowledge and methods to legal contexts. It examines language evidence to solve crimes or legal disputes. Key areas of study include legal texts, legal processes like court examinations, and forensic text types like ransom notes, suicide letters, and social media posts. Linguistic evidence is used in legal proceedings for tasks like author identification, forensic stylistics, forensic phonetics, and discourse analysis.

Uploaded by

Ingrida Girdziušaitė
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Areas of study, text types, use in legal proceedings.

Forensic linguistics, is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to


the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a
branch of applied linguistics. In short, it is a discipline analysing language-based evidence that
might help to solve a crime or legal disagreement.
There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts:

 understanding language of the written law,


 understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes, and
 the provision of linguistic evidence.
The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogeneous; it involves a range of experts and
researchers in different areas of the field.

Areas of study
The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse, but research occurs in the following
areas:
The language of legal texts
The study of the language of legal texts includes a wide range of forensic texts. That includes the
study of text types and forms of analysis. Any text or item of spoken language can potentially be
a forensic text when it is used in a legal or criminal context. This includes analysing the
linguistics of documents as diverse as Acts of Parliament (or other law-making body), private
wills, court judgements and summonses and the statutes of other bodies, such as States and
government departments.
The language of legal processes
Among other things, this area examines language as it is used in cross-examination, evidence
presentation, judge's direction, police cautions, police testimonies in court, summing up to a jury
interview techniques, the questioning process in court and in other areas such as police
interviews.
During the examination process, language plays a substantial role in the presentation of a story to
the courtroom. For example, in an instance where a lawyer is examining a hostile witness, they
will often use language to limit the response of the witness, in order to avoid having the witness
present conflicting evidence. In this instance, yes/no questions will be targeted, and questions
with room for elaboration, such as wh-formation questions, will likely be avoided. In a situation
where a lawyer interviews a friendly witness whose testimony could potentially strengthen the
story constructed by him, the opposite may occur where wh-questions are targeted to allow for
elaboration.
Forensic text types
Emergency call
In an emergency call, the recipient or emergency operator's ability to extract primarily linguistic
information in threatening situations is crucial.
Urgency plays a role in these calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly
short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has
distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns, they are usually very emotional, maybe a bit
scattered.
Ransom demands or other threat communication
This area of forensic text types is very broad and includes a variety of different aspects that could
potentially be applied analyzing texts..i would probably need at least few hours to talk about all of them
especially when it comes to analysis of handwriting.

Ransom demands in the style of written notes have been present in many notable cases. The style
of writing used in ransom notes are examined by forensic linguists in order to determine the
writing's true intent, as well as determining who wrote the note. Forensic linguists look at factors
such as syntactic structures, stylistic patterns, punctuation and even spelling while analyzing
ransom notes the choice of words.
Suicide letters
A suicide note is typically brief, concise and highly propositional with a degree of evasiveness.
The proposition of genuine suicide is thematic, directed to the addressee and relevant to the
relationship between them. Suicide notes generally have sentences alluding to the act of killing
oneself, or the method of suicide that was undertaken. Genuine suicide letters are short, typically
less than 300 words in length.
Death row statements
Death row statements either admit the crime or deny the crime. They may also denounce
witnesses as dishonest, critique law enforcement as corrupt in an attempt to portray innocence or
seek an element of revenge in their last moments. Manifesto
Social media
Social media statements are often context specific, and their interpretation can be highly
subjective. Forensic application of a selection of stylistic and stylometric techniques has been
done mainly in relation to Facebook. Analysis of social media postings can reveal a lot about
suspect or victim for forensic linguistic analysts.

Use of linguistic evidence in legal proceedings


These areas of application have varying degrees of acceptability or reliability within the field.
But they tend to be a great help solving cases, especially cold ones.
Author identification
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).
Firstly, language is not an inherited property, but one which is socially acquired. An individual's
use of language is always prone to variation from a variety of sources, including other speakers,
the media and social changes. Education can have a profoundly huge effect on language use. 
Forensic stylistics
This discipline subjects written or spoken materials (or both), to scientific analysis for
determination and measurement of content, meaning, speaker identification, or determination of
authorship in identifying plagiarism.
Probably the famous example, that also helped to catch one of the biggest serial killers is that the
case of Theodore Kaczynski, who was eventually convicted of being the "Unabomber,". His
family members recognized his writing style in the published 35,000-word Industrial Society
and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto") and then notified the authorities.
FBI agents searching Kaczynski's hut found hundreds of documents written by Kaczynski but
not published anywhere. An analysis produced by FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald identified
numerous lexical items and phrases common to the two documents. 
Forensic phonetics
The forensic phonetician is concerned with the production of accurate transcriptions of what was
being said. Transcriptions can reveal information about a speaker's social and regional
background. Voice recording as a supplement to the transcription can be useful as it allows
victims and witnesses to indicate whether the voice of a suspect is that of the accused. Though
this field is highly criticized due to a probability of mishearing and mispronouncing.
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis deals with analyzing written, oral, or sign language use, or any
significant semiotic event. For example, the utterance of 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' as responses can
indicate a lot of information for discourse analysts. Discourse analysts are not always allowed to
testify but during preparation for a case they are often useful to lawyers.
Linguistic dialectology in my long speech
It is becoming more important to conduct systematic studies of dialects, especially within the
English language, because they are no longer as distinct as they once were due to the mass media
and population mobility, political and social. It is becoming harder to determine an individual's
origin by means of his/her language or dialect.

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