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)
“Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“From his proceedings in Congress, he appears demented, and his actings and doings inspire my pity more than anger.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)