An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics

Language in Evidence

Malcolm Coulthard, Alison Johnson, David Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317246657
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence has established itself as the essential textbook written by leading authorities in this expanding field. The second edition of this bestselling textbook begins with a new introduction and continues in two parts.

Part One deals with the language of the legal process, and begins with a substantial new chapter exploring key theoretical and methodological approaches. In four updated chapters it goes on to cover the language of the law, initial calls to the emergency services, police interviewing, and courtroom discourse. Part Two looks at language as evidence, with substantially revised and updated chapters on the following key topics:

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• the forensic linguist

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• forensic phonetics

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• authorship attribution

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• the linguistic investigation of plagiarism

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• the linguist as expert witness.

The authors combine an array of perspectives on forensic linguistics, using knowledge and experience gained in legal settings – Coulthard in his work as an expert witness for cases such as the Birmingham Six and the Derek Bentley appeal, and Johnson as a former police officer. Research tasks, further reading, web links, and a new conclusion ensure that this remains the core textbook for courses in forensic linguistics and language and the law. A glossary of key terms is also available at https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138641716 and on the Routledge Language and Communication Portal.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315630311-1

Jaffa Cakes – definitely not biscuits – prepare to take on imitators

… McVitie’s was determined to prove it [the Jaffa Cake] should be free of the consumer tax. The key turning point was when its QC highlighted how cakes harden when they go stale, biscuits go soggy. A Jaffa goes hard. Case proved.

(The Telegraph, 5 December 2015)

Shipman jailed for 15 murders

Family GP Harold Shipman has been jailed for life for murdering 15 patients, as he goes down in history as the UK’s biggest convicted serial killer. He was also found guilty of forging the will of Kathleen Grundy, one of his patients.

(BBC News, 31 January 2000)

Court rejects Da Vinci copy claim

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown did not breach the copyright of an earlier book, London’s High Court has ruled.

(BBC News, 7 April 2006)

Google successfully defends its most valuable asset in court

The ‘Google’ trademark regularly ranks as one of the most valuable in the world […]. Recently, Google’s opponents in a court case claimed [it] had become ‘generic’ […] [T]he court decisively rejected the challenge, confirming that ‘Google’ remains a valid and protectable trademark.

(Forbes, www.forbes.com, 15 September 2014)

Man remanded in Ripper hoax probe

A 49-year-old man has been remanded in custody charged with being the infamous Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer known as Wearside Jack. The clerk at Leeds Magistrates’ Court read the charge to Mr Humble, which said he was accused of sending the letters and audiotape between 1 March 1978 and 30 June 1979 [27 years earlier].

(BBC News, 20 October 2005)

Legal words, murder, plagiarism, trademarks and a voice hoax

Linguistic aspects of legal stories often make headline news around the world, indicating the high profile given to such material by newsmakers. Five such headlines and reports taken from news media form the epigraphs for this introduction. The first story involves the now famous – Jaffa cake – biscuit or cake? – court case between United Biscuits and Customs and Excise over value added tax (VAT). The case revolved around the legal definition, in tax law, of ‘food’ versus ‘confectionary’. ‘Cake’ is defined as an essential food, whereas ‘biscuits’ are luxuries. This case and a similar one involving whether Pringles are crisp-like or non-crisp-like are discussed in Chapter 3, drawing our attention to the differences between the legal meanings and ordinary meanings of words.

The second refers to the case of Harold Shipman, a doctor who was convicted in January 2000 of the murder of 15 of his patients. The judge, the Honourable Mr Justice Forbes, observed that ‘there has never been another case in this country [Britain] which has required the investigation of as many possible murders committed by a single individual as needed to be investigated in this case’ (The Shipman Inquiry 2001). In Chapters 4 and 5 we deal with material from the Shipman case when we analyse police interviews and courtroom testimony.

The third story relates to the alleged copying of material by Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, from an earlier work of non-fiction, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG). This claim for damages, brought by the authors of the earlier work, delayed the launch of the film of the same name and thereby raised the profile of copying, plagiarism and copyright violation in the minds of the general public. The headline in the epigraph (Court rejects Da Vinci copy claim) reports the ruling in favour of the defendant, Random House, that they (and Brown) did not infringe copyright in the novel. The judge’s conclusion was that ‘there is no copyright infringement either by textual copying or non-textual copying of a substantial part of HBHG by means of copying the Central Themes’ (Baigent v Random House, 7 April 2006). Plagiarism is treated in more detail in Chapter 9.

The fourth story – about trademark protection for the Google name – is concerned with the interesting question of how far companies can claim to ‘own’ words and have the right to decide who can use them and in what circumstances – and it gives an insight into the process of continually needing to defend a trademark, which involves preventing the protected word(s) from slipping into common usage as a generic meaning, which they are liable to do. If that happens, anyone can use the word(s) and benefit from all the investment in marketing and publicity. In Chapter 6, we show McDonald’s’ and others’ vigorous defences of their marks.

The final story is about the uniqueness of voices and whether a tape recording of a speaker committing a crime a quarter of a century earlier can be successfully matched with the contemporary vocal output of a recently arrested suspect, in spite of the passage of time and its effect on the voice. It draws us into the world of forensic phonetics and speaker identification. The most significant case in England is that of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, a serial killer who, between 1975 and 1979, murdered 13 women in the Leeds and Bradford area of Yorkshire. In June 1979, Stanley Ellis, a phonetician, dialectologist and lecturer at the University of Leeds, was called in by police after a tape recording, purporting to be from ‘The Ripper’, was sent to them. At the same time Jack Windsor Lewis, another linguist, was employed to analyse three letters sent to the police apparently from the same person (see Windsor Lewis 1994). Ellis’s analysis led him to report to police: ‘in my opinion the man’s voice represented someone who had been brought up in the Southwick or Castletown areas [of Sunderland]’ (Ellis 1994: 202). Ellis and Windsor Lewis became concerned that the letters and tape recording could be a hoax and that therefore eliminating from the murder investigation all suspects who did not have a north-eastern accent was a mistake. In 1981, Peter Sutcliffe, a lorry driver from Bradford, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but Sutcliffe did not have a Sunderland accent, so, as Ellis noted, ‘the identity of a man who sent [the] tape and letters … has never been discovered’ (1994: 206). However, in October 2005, 26 years after the tapes had been sent, a Sunderland labourer, John Humble, was arrested and charged with sending the hoax letters and the tape to the police. Not only did Humble’s genetic profile match a saliva sample taken from one of the original hoax letter’s envelopes, but forensic phoneticians were able to match the voice on the 1979 hoax recording with Humble’s voice as recorded in his 2005 police interview. Humble’s address was given in court as Flodden Road, Ford Estate, in the suburb of South Hylton in Sunderland, half a kilometre away from Southwick and Castletown, which had been identified by Ellis as the two likely places of origin. This case highlights the way that forensic phoneticians’ work is used alongside other investigative processes – see French et al. (2006) for a report by the phoneticians involved and Chapter 7 for more forensic phonetic cases. The Yorkshire Ripper case is also the focus of recent interest. The convicted killer is reported to be a potential suspect in other unsolved cases (Meikle, 2015) and the ‘Wearside Jack’ story is being made into a movie (Child, 2015).

These five headline stories highlight some of the media interest in legal cases and some of the concerns of forensic linguistics and phonetics. These and others that will be treated in subsequent chapters are:

• the language of legal documents;
• the language of the police and of law enforcement;
• interviews with children and vulnerable witnesses in the legal system;
• courtroom interaction;
• authorship attribution and plagiarism;
• forensic phonetics and speaker identification;
• linguistic evidence and expert witness testimony in courtrooms.

Who is this book for?

The book is designed for students on taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in forensic linguistics, law and language and legal linguistics, but could, equally well, be used by advanced students and researchers as a stand-alone introduction to forensic linguistics and by lecturers planning such courses. In addition, we know that forensic linguistics is taught as a topic on a diverse range of courses, such as: applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, criminology, education, law, psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology, translation, and many more. This book will form a useful resource for students and lecturers there too. Equally, not all the researchers to whom we refer in this book would identify themselves within a field called forensic linguistics (they might identify as criminologists, psychologists, lawyers, sociolinguists or sociologists), but their work is, nevertheless, included in bibliographies of forensic linguistics.

Organisation of the book

The book is divided into two parts: ‘The Language of the Legal Process’ and ‘Language as Evidence’.

Part I, Chapters 2 to 5 of the book, offers a thorough grounding in forensic approaches to language analysis and explores key ideas in legal language (Chapter 3), emergency service calls and police interviews and courtroom discourse (Chapters 4 and 5). Students and researchers are equipped in Part I to carry out research tasks on understanding the legal language of terms and conditions, statutes and contracts, the language of emergency calls and police interviews, and the use of questions in courtroom examination and cross-examination activities. This work is underpinned by the introduction to theoretical and methodological issues in Chapter 2. Part II, Chapters 6 to 10, discusses forensic linguistic and phonetic casework, research and practice. The cases in which expert evidence has been commissioned from linguists range from disputes about the meaning of individual morphemes in a trademark dispute and of individual words in jury instructions, through the ‘ownership’ of particular words and phrases in a plagiarism case, to accusations in certain murder cases that whole texts have been fabricated. Students and researchers are equipped in Part II to carry out research tasks in relation to authorship attribution, speaker identification, plagiarism and trademark law.

Descriptive linguistics and forensic linguistics work hand-in-hand: corpora and real data, though they are often limited in size and availability, are central to our endeavour. All of the texts used in this book are authentic, and the majority have been the focus of teaching or research, or are taken from cases where linguistic expertise has been called upon. The text extracts used in each chapter promote critical analytical discussion and the chapters are designed to develop an understanding of current research, field-specific vocabulary, skills and knowledge as well as to stimulate reflection and discussion. The book represents the authors’ belief in the centrality of the text as the basis of teaching and research.

Reading and research tasks and how they function

Each chapter ends with Suggested Readings. These vary in number, but are intended as a fairly comprehensive starting point for students and researchers at all levels. Since it is impossible to guess what any given reader knows already, we suggest that you concentrate on those texts that are new to you. For some readers, for example, law students with no linguistic background, there will be a need to select more, and for others, fewer readings. We intend each chapter to be an introduction to one particular area of forensic linguistics and expect readers to use the follow-up readings, as well as items selected from the references, to develop a wider knowledge. After completing the first edition of this book in 2007, Coulthard and Johnson edited The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (2010), which was designed specifically as a companion volume. It has 39 chapters produced by 40 internationally recognised authors and therefore many of the suggested readings are from there. At the same time, the discipline is continually developing, but books can only be updated occasionally, so you are advised to become a regular reader of the discipline’s two major journals: the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law and Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito.

Each chapter also contains a set of related Research Tasks. Sometimes they suggest research that replicates a published study, sometimes a more detailed analysis of a text referred to in the chapter, while yet others propose investigations that could be the basis of undergraduate or postgraduate projects or theses. Individual tasks can be used by students for independent research or set by teachers as tasks to be reported on in class. Equally, they could be set or adapted as assignment or project questions. Research tasks are intended to engage readers in two central ways: in a reflective response to the ideas raised in the chapters and in a pract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The Language of the Legal Process
• PART II Language as Evidence
• References
• Index