Forensic Linguistics, Third Edition

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Foreword Who should use this book? About the authors INTRODUCTION What is forensic linguistics? The language of the law: Meaning The discourse of the law Authorship attribution History of forensic linguistics in practice Outline of this book PART ONE: LANGUAGE AS FORENSIC EVIDENCE Introduction to Part One 1 The road to authorship The beginnings of literacy The role of memory in language Orality in early written language The transition from orality to literacy The first author? Conclusion 2 The author constructed The doctrine of authorship Authorship as an individual act Text as property The genius of the author Style Social factors and language style Aspects of style Conclusion 3 Time, variation and genre Introduction Expected and unexpected relationships in the genre domain The genre institution and the author space Comparison across genres Testing author-genre relationships A corpus of 32 novels Entropy and ectropy in the language system Conclusion 4 Range of variation Individual range variation Variation and interpersonal relationships Is variation random? The token 'you' as a variable in the mobile phone text corpus The '-ing' inflection Conclusion 5 Textual variation Register factors Non-register factors Polyphonic factors Conclusion 6 Forensic phonetics: An introduction by Harry Hollien Defining forensic phonetics Signal analysis Speech decoding and transcripts Authenticating recordings Behavioural analyses The aural–perceptual approach Machine–computer approaches Natural speech vectors Validating the approach Detecting behaviour from voice Alcohol–speech relationships Detection of deception Evaluations Forensic phonetics continues to develop 7 Cybercrime Introduction Types of e-crime Conclusion PART TWO: DEALING WITH LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE Introduction to Part Two 8 Forensic texts What types of forensic text are there? What are typical features of different types of forensic text? 9 Forensic transcription The text is the evidence Transcription exercises of audio material 10 Forensic authorship in practice Introduction Notes on preliminary procedures An example of imitation Exercise commentaries 11 Investigating author variation in naturalistic data The corpus The texts Variables The study Conclusion regarding the experiment into naturalistic data 12 Forensic linguistic evidence in court The texts in the case The features in the texts Excerpts from prosecution reports Conclusion PART THREE: THE LEGAL PROCESS: LANGUAGE AND THE LAW Introduction to Part Three 13 Power in legal contexts: The courts Power in court Rules of questioning Linguistic disadvantages before the law Conclusion 14 Power in legal contexts: The police Situational features and rules of behaviour 'Verballing' in police testimonies Police and the 'right to silence' Conclusion 15 Vulnerable witnesses Vulnerability and the law Children as vulnerable witnesses 'Intimidated' witnesses and rape Disabilities and the legal process Courtroom interpreting and translation LADO assessments and the forensic linguist Conclusion PART FOUR: LANGUAGE OF THE LAW Introduction to Part Four 16 The law and us The meaning of words What does malice mean? Conclusion 17 The language of statutes The language of statutes and the language of courts Am I entitled to a lawyer? In all criminal prosecutions High legal art and judicial disingenuousness The grading of probability Where actus commences Attitude to risk Conclusion Appendix 1: Forensic texts Appendix 2: Exercises and exercise commentaries Appendix 3: Active researchers in the field of forensic linguistics Bibliography Author Index Subject Index