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:
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious or so insidious a lobby. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby.... I know that in this I am speaking for the members of the two houses, who would rejoice as much as I would to be released from this unbearable situation.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“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)