Use of Linguistic Evidence in Legal Proceedings
These areas of application have varying degrees of acceptability or reliability within the field. Linguists have provided evidence in:
- Trademark and other intellectual property disputes
- Disputes of meaning and use
- Author identification (determining who wrote an anonymous text by making comparisons to known writing samples of a suspect; such as threat letters, mobile phone texts or emails)
- Forensic stylistics (identifying cases of plagiarism)
- Voice identification, also known as forensic phonetics, used to determine, through acoustic qualities, if the voice on a tape recorder is that of the defendant)
- Discourse analysis (the analysis of the structure of written or spoken utterance to determine who is introducing topics or whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in criminal conspiracy)
- Language analysis (forensic dialectology) tracing the linguistic history of asylum seekers (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin)
- Reconstruction of mobile phone text conversations
- Forensic phonetics
Specialist databases of samples of spoken and written natural language (called corpora) are now frequently used by forensic linguists. These include corpora of suicide notes, mobile phone texts, police statements, police interview records and witness statements. They are used to analyse language, understand how it is used, and to reduce the effort needed to identify words that tend to occur near each other (collocations or collocates).
Read more about this topic: Forensic Linguistics
Famous quotes containing the words linguistic, evidence, legal and/or proceedings:
“It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say “that is red” instead of “that reddens,” either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Generally there is no consistent evidence of significant differences in school achievement between children of working and nonworking mothers, but differences that do appear are often related to maternal satisfaction with her chosen role, and the quality of substitute care.”
—Ruth E. Zambrana, U.S. researcher, M. Hurst, and R.L. Hite. “The Working Mother in Contemporary Perspectives: A Review of Literature,” Pediatrics (December 1979)
“The disfranchisement of a single legal elector by fraud or intimidation is a crime too grave to be regarded lightly.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“And no one, it seemed, had had the presence of mind
To initiate proceedings or stop the wheel
From the number it was backing away from as it stopped:
It was performing prettily; the puncture stayed unseen....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)