Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito

New Trends in Forensic Linguistics

2022-11-22T08:52:09+00:00

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD)

2022-11-22T08:55:29+00:00

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) is a permanent,
controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data. We broadly
understand forensic linguistics as any academic research with a potential to
improve the delivery of justice through the analysis of language. FoLD thus
comprises a wide range of datasets with relevance to forensic linguistics and
language and law, including commercial extortion letters, investigative interviews
in police and other contexts, legal documents, forum posts from far-right online
groups, and comment threads from political blogs. This paper outlines how FoLD
works and its potential impact on the general discipline of forensic linguistics.

For the Record

2022-11-22T09:02:35+00:00

Recent research (Haworth 2018) has demonstrated how investigative
interview data are (unintentionally) distorted as they pass through the criminal
justice system, and the survey-based experiment we present here was designed
to test our hypothesis that various aspects of the processing of police-suspect
interview data may have an impact on the quality of the official evidential
document produced. The quantitative and qualitative findings from this
experiment shed light on, and provide a sound evidence base for this claim, rather
than leaving it as an untested assumption. The experiment was designed to
test each key aspect of the current process of the production of routine written
transcripts of investigative interviews (ROTIs), focusing on the conversion from
spoken to written format, and the use of different transcription conventions, and
it has enabled us to investigate which changes make the most difference in terms
of the evidential quality of the end product, in order to effect a change in practice
which will reduce or eliminate the effect of those changes. Our findings suggest
that when presented with a transcript of a police interview, we are significantly
more likely to (1) perceive the interviewee as anxious and unrelaxed, (2) interpret
the interviewee’s behaviour as being agitated, aggressive, defensive, and nervous,
(3) determine that the interviewee is un-calm and uncooperative, and (4) deem
the interviewee’s version of events to be untrue, than we are if we listen to the
original audio recording. Moreover, subjects identified (a) consistency, (b) phrase
and lexical choice, (c) emotion (crying/upset), (d) hesitation and/or pauses as
significant factors influencing participants’ perception and interpretation of the
interviewee and their story. This is particularly concerning as the latter two
features are not currently routinely included in police transcripts, and Haworth
(2018) illustrates multiple ways in which transcripts might differ from the original
audio recordings they are intended to replace, with respect to words and phrases,
as well as general content. The findings presented in this paper provide a strong
motivation for further research into how we capture spoken interaction in legal
contexts, and they constitute something of a mandate for reform with respect to
the transcription of police interviews in the UK.

Killer stance

2022-11-22T09:05:46+00:00

An individual’s set of psychological traits, or their psychopathology,
impacts howthey experience theworld around them, and language offers resources
that allow for that experience to be shared with and communicated to someone
else. That language can then be analyzed for patterns and their connections
to the psychological traits. In a forensic context, such connections may give
valuable insights. There already exist psychological and linguistic approaches
to the analysis of forensic texts, but the psychological approach largely lacks
grounding in linguistic theory and the linguistic approach does not typically allow
consideration of psychological characteristics. What this paper aims to provide
is a step toward bridging that gap. In this paper we examine the system of
attitude from the Appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005) and
adapted by Gales (2010) and Hurt (2020) applying this to the writings of four serial
murderers with documented mental health diagnoses. Significant patterns in the
attitudinal resources were identified quantitatively and examined qualitatively
through the lens of the psychological traits that comprised the authors’ diagnoses
to determine if there was a relationship between them. Despite the obvious
limitation presented by the sample size, the results of this study suggest the
approach presented in this paper warrants further investigation.

The importance of being heard

2022-11-22T09:08:40+00:00

The article explores narrativisation practices in small claims cases and
private family proceedings, focusing predominantly on cases where at least one
of the parties is not represented by a lawyer. By drawing on the data collected
during court observations and analysed using the ethnography of communication
as the main methodological framework, the study identifies narrative genres
across different stages of legal proceedings and illustrates communication barriers
experienced by lay court users. The discussion focuses on how formalised narrative
genres and the staggered presentation of narratives impact the degree to which
court users can use their voice. The article also links the notion of voice projection
to procedural justice and suggests that the main narratives should be elicited
sooner as part of an open narrative strategy to ensure the court users’ voices are
heard by the judiciary in the initial stages of the proceedings.

‘Psy’ expert evidence in the family courts

2022-11-22T09:13:47+00:00

This article introduces corpus-assisted linguistic methods as an
exploratory means of analysing expert psychologists’ reports used in public family
law (child protection) cases. Analysis of this dataset is a new application for corpus
linguistics (CL) and the primary purpose of this article is to explore viability and
potential for its future research using CL as a core method. For this study we have
created and analysed a 25 single-text-type specialised written corpus consisting of
25 expert psychologists’ reports (the Psychology Report Corpus “PRC-25”). The
reports are a random sample selected from a population of all psychologists’
reports held in Cafcass files over a 10-year period, representing the first corpus
of its kind in a currently under-researched area. Our study uses both an inductive
(data-driven) approach to identify significant themes and topics in the reports,
and a deductive (legal-intuitive) approach to explore psychologists’ use of legally
significant terms, especially risk of and significant harm. We also explore the
possibility for using this new methodological protocol to triangulate analysis
of a larger and representative corpus of expert psychologists’ reports, and the
possibilities for corpus-driven analysis of the genre of written expert evidence text
types more generally.

Native Dialect Influence Detection (NDID)

2022-11-22T09:18:12+00:00

The current investigation addresses a vital lacuna in forensic authorship
studies, and more concretely, in Native Language Influence Detection (NLID)
research: narrowing down a speaker’s native dialect instead of only their native
language (L1), which might not be enough when carrying out sociolinguistic profiling
tasks. Native Dialect Influence Detection (NDID), the focus of our study,
can thus greatly aid at the investigative level. We approach this topic by providing
a comprehensive analysis of linguistic features that serve to identify two
non-contact dialects of L1 Spanish (i.e., Mexican and Peninsular varieties) when
dealing with data written in L2 English, which come from Tripadvisor. Our main
aim is to investigate if an author’s L2 features can point to their L1 native dialect,
rather than only to their native language. Findings point to L1 dialectal
transfer of punctuation signs, adjectives of affect, and intensifiers: these linguistic
features, even when expressed in an L2, show a culturally bound use. Additionally,
we implemented an automatic classifier that achieved an accuracy of 69% in
categorizing test data, using only linguistic features that have explanatory power
and can aid linguistic theory. This is key for explainability in the forensic context,
which Native Language Identification (NLI) studies tend to neglect (Kingston
2019). Results show that L1 Spanish dialects can be differentiated by analyzing L2
English text, pointing to NDID as a fertile approach for narrowing down candidate
L1 dialects of a language when analyzing L2 data.

An investigation of the lexico-grammatical profile of English legal- lay language

2022-11-22T09:22:53+00:00

The article presents a study on the lexico-grammar of the genre of
English legal-lay language (Tiersma 1999), using the English subcorpus of the
CorIELLS corpus (Busso forthcoming). The study explores four grammatical
constructions (in Goldberg 2006’s Construction Grammar sense): nominalisations
heading prepositional phrase attachments, modal verb constructions, participial
reduced relative constructions, and passive constructions. Specifically, we use
collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch 2013), followed by a vocabulary analysis
using English core vocabulary as a reference (Brezina and Gablasova 2015), and
a comparative frequency analysis with corpora of legal language and generaldomain
written prose. Results of this first part of the study foreground how legallay
language is quantitatively different from both neighbouring genres, suggesting
that it might be considered a “blended” genre. We further explore the data in terms
of accessibility for speakers, using readability metrics and a survey on English
participants. Both methods show that legal-lay language is at an intermediate
level of complexity between legal jargon and general-domain prose; however, we
further note that readability metrics generally underestimate speakers’ ability to
comprehend legal-lay language.

Commercialising disadvantage

2022-11-22T09:31:04+00:00

The commercial bail bond industry is one of the most profitable aspects
of America’s highly marketized criminal justice system that is increasingly
shaped by neoliberal structures and ideologies. Drawing on a specialised corpus
of “Home” and “About Us” pages from bail bond websites, this paper is the first
empirical linguistic examination of commercial bail bonds discourse grounded in
its legal context. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we examine
how bail bond companies 1) discursively present and promote their services, 2)
represent the legal system and its processes, and 3) construe arrest and detention
to prospective service users. The findings show that bail bond companies position
their services as an unobjectionably common (Brookes and Harvey 2017a) part
of legal and financial self-management by normalising, legitimising, and idealising
their use whilst seeking to minimise the power-imbalance between themselves
and their often financially and socially disempowered ‘clients’. By grounding our
linguistic analysis in a legal context, we demonstrate that these discourses simultaneously
serve whilst oppress those they purport to help, offering an example of
a local form of structural violence that subtly perpetuates neoliberal agendas and
a two-tier justice system.

Complete Issue

2022-11-22T09:41:51+00:00

Language as Evidence.

2022-11-22T09:36:26+00:00

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics

2022-11-22T09:39:52+00:00