An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence

by Coulthard; Malcolm

• ISBN13: 9780415320238
• ISBN10: 0415320232
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2008-01-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

From the accusation of plagiarism surrounding The Da Vinci Code, to the infamous hoaxer in the Yorkshire Ripper case, the use of linguistic evidence in court and the number of linguists called to act as expert witnesses in court trials has increased rapidly in the past fifteen years. An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics provides a timely and accessible introduction to this rapidly expanding subject.

Author Biography

Malcolm Coulthard is Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, UK Alison Johnson is lecturer in English Language at the University of Leeds, UK

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Introduction - falsification, plagiarism, trademarks and hoax	p. 1
A brief history of forensic linguistics	p. 5
On forensic discourse analysis	p. 7
Organisation of the book	p. 8
Reading and research tasks and how they function	p. 9
The language of the legal process	p. 11
Approaching a forensic text	p. 13
Introduction	p. 13
Approaching a forensic text - discourse and text analytic tools for forensic contexts	p. 14
The texts	p. 17
Text analysis	p. 24
Some contrastive observations on the texts	p. 32
Conclusion	p. 33
Further reading	p. 33
Research tasks	p. 34
The language of the law	p. 35
Introduction	p. 35
Legal style and register	p. 37
Ordinary and special meanings	p. 46
On applying the law	p. 48
Conclusion	p. 50
Further reading	p. 51
Research tasks	p. 52
Legal genres	p. 54
Introduction	p. 55
Defining 'genre' - functional hybridity	p. 55
Legal contexts	p. 62
Conclusion	p. 68
Further reading	p. 69
Research tasks	p. 69
Collecting evidence: calls to the emergency services and first encounters with witnesses and suspects	p. 71
Introduction	p. 71
First encounters - calls to the emergency services	p. 72
Policespeak, lawyerspeak and listening	p. 76
Police interviews - from talk to text and text to talk	p. 80
Police interviews and social interaction	p. 82
Vulnerable witnesses - on interviewing children and rape victims	p. 87
Conclusion	p. 93
Further reading	p. 93
Research tasks	p. 93
Order in court	p. 95
Introduction: into the courtroom	p. 95
The trial as a complex genre	p. 96
Two discourse types: narrative and question-answer	p. 97
Witnesses and evidence in trials	p. 111
Conclusion	p. 116
Further reading	p. 117
Research tasks	p. 117
Language as evidence	p. 119
The work of the forensic linguist	p. 121
Introduction	p. 121
Morphological meaning and phonetic similarity	p. 121
Syntactic complexity in a letter	p. 123
Lexico-grammatical ambiguity	p. 124
Lexical meaning	p. 125
Pragmatic meaning	p. 128
The recording of interaction in written form - police interview notes	p. 132
Narrative analysis of a disputed statement	p. 135
The challenges for non-native speakers	p. 137
Conclusion	p. 142
Further reading	p. 142
Research tasks	p. 142
The work of the forensic phonetician and the document examiner	p. 144
The work of the forensic phonetician	p. 144
Transcription	p. 144
Speaker profiling	p. 148
Speaker identification by professionals	p. 148
Voice line-ups and Naive Speaker Recognition	p. 152
The work of the document analyst	p. 156
Conclusion	p. 159
Further reading	p. 160
Research tasks	p. 160
Idiolect and uniqueness of encoding	p. 161
Introduction	p. 161
Early interest in authorship attribution	p. 163
Cusum	p. 167
Specific analyses	p. 169
A case report	p. 173
Conclusion	p. 180
Further reading	p. 180
Research tasks	p. 180
On textual borrowing	p. 184
Introduction	p. 184
The history of plagiarism	p. 185
Universities and plagiarism	p. 186
Do people repeat themselves?	p. 191
The evidential value of single identical strings	p. 196
Coda	p. 198
Further reading	p. 198
Research tasks	p. 198
The linguist as expert witness	p. 200
On being an expert witness	p. 200
Expressing opinions	p. 201
Admissible evidence	p. 207
Consulting and testifying as tour guides	p. 210
Conclusion	p. 215
Further reading	p. 215
Research task	p. 215
References	p. 216
Index	p. 232
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