Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Forensic Communication in Theory and PracticeA Study of Discourse Analysis and Transcription
2017
This edited volume is a useful addition to the body of academic literature bringing information to the English-speaking world about the practice of forensic linguistics in non-English-speaking countries – a body which, despite valuable contributions in the current journal and elsewhere, remains too small. A particularly welcome aspect of the book is its inclusion of several chapters on an area too lightly covered in academic literature in any language, namely transcription of covert recordings (conversations captured secretly, by telephone intercept or by ambient or undercover recording, and used as forensic evidence in criminal trials). In this, as in other topics covered, another commendable aspect of the book is the intertwining of theoretical and practical topics captured by its title. The contents are based upon papers presented at the conference Theories, practices and instruments of forensic linguistics organised by the book’s editors in Rome, 1-3 Dec 20141. After an introduc...
The Police Journal
Since the UK Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced tape recorders to police interview rooms in 1984, the insights gained from audio- (and, more recently, video-) recorded police interview data have enabled forensic psychologists to analyse the cognitive and behavioural processes of interview participants, leading to sweeping changes in the way that interviewing is taught and practised by British police officers. However, less attention has been paid to the language of police interviewing and police interviewing methods practised in other parts of the world, such as the Reid Technique, which is ubiquitous in North America. This paper seeks to address both these deficiencies by introducing a linguistic perspective to the analysis of data drawn from an Australian corpus of recorded police interviews. This analysis examined the ‘roles’ that speakers take up when producing talk as a way of showing how the speaker aligns to the content of the talk. It finds that voluntary confession...
Police interviews with suspects in police stations in England
2018
This thesis is about police interviews with suspects in England. The suspects in these interviews have been arrested in connection with their involvement in relatively low-level offences. They comprise incidents ranging from threatening behaviour, harassment and breach of bail conditions to criminal damage, theft and assault. They are certainly not the remarkable and dramatic cases which appear in the front pages of the newspapers and fill television programmes over the week; nonetheless they are hugely important to the fabric of law-in-action in our society, as they represent the most ordinary and mundane legal work in the context of the criminal justice system in England. I draw upon a sample of 27 investigative interviews with suspects, recorded in audio as part of a standard police procedure for potential use in court. The data was transcribed and analysed within an ethnomethodological framework and using conversation analysis. My research focuses principally on three particular aspects of police-suspect social interactions: how police questioning is oriented to some key legal concepts, e.g. actus reus, mens rea and evidence, that underpin the decision about whether the event investigated was indeed a criminal offence; how suspects’ narratives or accounts are co-constructed, i.e. negotiated, evaluated and transformed, in order to gain legal relevance – especially in terms of the legal concepts aforementioned; and the linguistic resources and the sense-making practices used by police officers to transform lay narratives or accounts into legal informed material. My analysis is divided as follows. In chapter 4, I examine how police officers may elicit prejudicial information from suspects. In chapter 5, I describe in more detail how police officers transform and summarise what they themselves or the suspects have previously said in the interview. Following this, in chapter 6 and 7, I address two very particular defensive strategies adopted by suspects when questioned about their involvement in a criminal offence: portraying the incident as an accident and blaming the putative victim. I show that these social actions and practices are fundamental for understanding how legal concepts not only inform these interactions but are also constructed through them; they orient not only the nature but also the direction of the questioning and the criteria for building a case.
Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics
The main aim of this paper is to raise awareness about the importance of language contrasts in legal interpreting contexts. The semantic typology of motion events put forward by Talmy (1991, 2000) and its implications for discourse and narrative (Slobin 1991, 1996, 2004, 2005) are used as an example of how an applied typology approach can be useful for the analysis of language contrasts in a forensic linguistics context. Applied Language Typology (Filipović 2008, 2017a, b) is used here to analyse transcriptions of police interviews that were mediated by an English-Spanish interpreter in California (USA) and an English-Portuguese interpreter in Norfolk (UK). The results of this analysis demonstrate that certain differences in semantic components of motion such as Manner, Cause and Deixis can lead interpreters to add, omit or modify the content of a message in the process of translation. This leads us to conclude that professional practices such as the production of bilingual transcri...
(2017) Forensic Communication in Theory and Practice
Forensic linguistics is a discipline that concerns General Linguistics, in particular Applied Linguistics and Forensic Science. Today, it is an autonomous discipline with its own methodology and it can regard any text, written, recorded or produced orally, that is somehow involved in a legal proceeding or in a criminal context. “Literally any text or item of spoken language has the potential of being a forensic text” (Olsson 2008, 1). The forensic linguistics expert who analyses recorded spontaneous speech needs a number of different skills across several disciplines (Chaski 1998, 2001a, 2001b): Phonetics and phonology, necessary for the study of the articulatory sound system of human speech, the sound inventory which characterizes a language or a dialect and the rules that govern the adjustments and changes that occur in spontaneous speech1; Morphology, to study the smallest units of language with meaning, the organization and the study of the internal structure of words; Syntax, to be aware of the rules that govern the internal structure of sentences, how words can be combined to create linguistically acceptable sentences; 1 In a recent court case, the non-competence of linguistics, phonetics and phonology on the part of a consultant to the Public Prosecutor led to a recording in South American Spanish being confused with one in Iberian Spanish and the subsequent arrest of an innocent party (pp 10061/11, against Oscar Sanchez, the Court of Appeal, 7th Criminal Division, Court of Naples). Chapter Three 48 Semantics, the study of meaning, the relationship between the meaning of (single) words and the meaning of (complete) sentences; Pragmatics, necessary to understand the use of language during a normal conversation and in all types of interactions and dialogue; Historical Linguistics, to study the evolution of a language and what the possible and predictable changes may be; Sociolinguistics, for the language used by a speech community, the study of the variables characterizing the language analyzed, focusing on differences of religion, social class, educational levels, gender, place of residence (city versus countryside, mountains versus coast), the interaction and interference between different languages and between language and dialect, and mixed-language production; Dialectology, to ensure a correct identification of dialects, local variables, regional dialects and their borders, the identification of isoglosses or isophones; Dialectometry, to study the distances between dialects and their internal regularity; Psycholinguistics, to understand how psychological and mental systems work in a human language; Neurolinguistics, to study the human nervous system and the neuroanatomical functioning of the brain; Computational Linguistics or Computer Science, to be able to use software and tools that help the expert during the analysis of the language and performance of individual speakers; Statistics, to analyse the results of a linguistic analysis, describe the phenomena and provide objective answers; Phonetics and Acoustic Signal analysis, to conduct an acoustic analysis of sounds, identify characteristic features, filter noisy signals, identify anonymous speakers, support the transcription of sound signals with low quality (Romito 2000); and, Law, to act in accordance with the procedural rules. The definition in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Linguistics (2010) reports that “forensic linguistics helps courts to answer three questions about a text—what does it say, what does it mean and who wrote, typed or authored it?”—confirming the initial interest in the written text. The first study was made in 1930 (second edition Bryant 1962) and analysed the function of words in legal language. Forensic linguistics was first used in a courtroom to gather evidence in 1968, when Jan Svartvik (Svarvtik 1968) showed in The statements: a case for Forensic Linguistics how style and grammar could be measured, and thus become elements of evidence in a court case (Fitzgerald 2004). This court case and especially A Training Program for Expert Forensic Transcribers 49 the publication of Svartvik are seen as the birth of a new discipline that came to the attention of the world with the arrest of the Unabomber in 1996 in the woods of Montana2. The first analyses, therefore, took place on written texts. Nowadays, with the development of telecommunications, there has been an increase in analyses conducted on acoustic recordings rather than on written declarations. The analyses that can be carried out on recorded sounds are: the identification of a sound or a noise; the determination of the originality or authenticity of the tape, support or recording; speech signal filtering; noise reduction or emphasis of a voice and, in general, an increase in intelligibility; the identification of an altered voice; speaker characterization; a comparison and perceptual comparison of two voices; speaker identification by objective methods; the transcription of interceptions and analysis of meaning in relation to noisy recordings. Unfortunately, forensic linguistics or phonetics does not exist as a teaching course in Italian universities. It is impossible, therefore, to establish whether it concerns Criminalistics, Investigative Science or Applied Linguistics or even Human Sciences, as is the case in other countries. Furthermore, academic scientific research on issues related to Forensic Linguistics does not stimulate great interest. The enthusiasm registered in the US and the UK has gradually faded in Italy after an initial surge in the 1970s and 1980s. Experts do not cooperate with each other and they tend to be graduates, accountants, engineers, linguists, sound engineers, doctors and so on. A similar task has never been given to people coming from such diverse academic paths and backgrounds (Romito 2010; Romito and Galatà 2008; Romito et al. 2008). We believe that only an appropriate training course could develop competence and increase the confidence of judges towards this discipline.
The Role of Forensic Linguistics in Crime Investigation: Uses in Legal Proceedings
2021
This paper considers the extent to which forensic linguistics can be considered a science, and outlines some ways in which it is useful in legal proceedings, including voice identification, the interpretation of police-suspect interaction, verification of police reports, and cross-cultural insights into speech patterns in a courtroom context. On the basis of the analysis, the paper concludes that Forensic linguistics can prove beneficial for the investigation of crimes, analysis of the judicial procedures, and particularly disputes in law. It can also be used for the analysis of courtroom discourse and interpret and translate the legal documents for their readability and comprehensibility. Moreover, the police cautions issued to the suspects can also be analyzed for their comprehensibility and the authorship attribution can be established for written or spoken texts. It, therefore, works as the interface between language, crime, and the law. Keywords: forensic linguistics, authorshi...
Introduction to special issue on Forensic Linguistics: European Perspectives
Nordic Journal of Linguistics
This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.