The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics

Malcolm Coulthard, Alison Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136998720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics provides a unique work of reference to the leading ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in Forensic Linguistics.

Forensic Linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. It looks at the linguist as expert providing evidence for the defence and prosecution, investigating areas from blackmail to trademarks and warning labels.

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics includes a comprehensive introduction to the field written by the editors and a collection of thirty-seven original chapters written by the world's leading academics and professionals, both established and up-and-coming, designed to equip a new generation of students and researchers to carry out forensic linguistic research and analysis.

The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics is the ideal resource for undergraduates or postgraduates new to the area.

Malcolm Coulthard is Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, UK. Author of numerous publications, the most recent being An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics (co-authored with Alison Johnson, Routledge, 2007).

Alison Johnson is Lecturer in Modern English Language at Leeds University, UK. Previous publications include An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics (co-authored with Malcolm Coulthard, Routledge, 2007).

Contributors: Janet Ainsworth, Michelle Aldridge, Dawn Archer, Kelly Benneworth, Vijay Bhatia, Ronald R. Butters, Deborah Cao, Malcolm Coulthard, Paul Drew and Traci Walker, Bethany Dumas, Diana Eades, Susan Ehrlich, Fiona English, Tim Grant, Peter Gray, Gillian Grebler, Mel Greenlee, Sandra Beatriz Hale, Chris Heffer, Elizabeth Holt and Alison Johnson, Kate Howarth, Michael Jessen, Krzystof Kredens and Ruth Morris, Greg Matoesian, Gerald McMenamin, Frances Rock, Laura Felton Rosulek, Nancy Schweda-Nicholson, Roger Shuy, Lawrence Solan, Elizabeth Stokoe and Derek Edwards, Peter Tiersma, Tatiana Tkaèuková, David Walsh and Ray Bull, David Woolls, and Jerome Bruner.

1
Introduction

Current debates in forensic linguistics

Alison Johnson and Malcolm Coulthard

‘Language is as it is because of what it has to do’.

Halliday (1973: 34)

Introduction

When Halliday wrote ‘language is as it is because of what it has to do’ a functional theory of language was born, giving us a perspective of meaning-making that is grounded in social practice and in the many varied and complex contexts in which we find ourselves. Context is dynamic and socially constructed through and by discourse – both in its linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic modes – and we know that the legal world is context-rich. It is peopled by a hierarchical mini-nation of judges, lawyers, police and law-enforcement officers and then the common man and woman, who walk, like Adam and Eve, unknowing, through this strange world. Its texts are also richly layered with meaning; its language has evolved over many centuries and its peculiar form is a result of this history and specialised use. What legal people do with lay people through legal language, legal texts and legal interaction is the focus of this Handbook. Leading scholars from the disciplines of linguistics, law, criminology and sociology examine the ways that language has and is being used, who is using it, how they are writing, where they are speaking, why they are interacting in that way and what is being accomplished through that interaction.

Forensic Linguistics has now come of age as a discipline. It has its own professional association, The International Association of Forensic Linguists, founded in 1993; its own journal, International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, founded in 1994; and a biennial international conference. There are three major introductory textbooks – Coulthard and Johnson (2007), Gibbons (2003) and Olsson (2nd ed. 2008a) – and a growing number of specialist monographs: Cotterill (2003), Eades (2008b), Heffer (2005) Heydon (2005) and Rock (2007), to mention just a few. Modules in forensic linguistics and/or language and the law are taught to undergraduate and Masters level students in a rapidly increasing number of universities worldwide and, at the time of writing, there are three specialist Masters degrees at the universities of Aston, Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and Cardiff, and an annual international summer school at Aston training the next generation of forensic linguists.

Aim, contents and organisation

The aim of this Handbook is to provide a unique work of reference to the leading ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in Forensic Linguistics, with chapters written by the world’s finest academics, both established and up-and-coming. Our intended audience is advanced undergraduates, graduates and research students as well as established researchers in other disciplines who are new to forensic linguistics. This is a handbook, not a textbook (as we noted above there are already several textbooks, including our own, Coulthard and Johnson 2007), and as such it is a comprehensive advanced introduction to core issues and topics in contemporary forensic linguistics. All the contributions include a richness of examples and case studies to enable the reader to see forensic linguistics applied and in action. Contributors come from Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, Israel, Poland, the UK and the USA and cross several professional and academic areas. The professions represented are numerous too: academic, attorney, computer scientist, forensic speaker identification and audio analyst, freelance consultant, interpreter, judge and translator, and some of the contributors have former professional experience as lawyer and police officer. The academics, as the list of contributors shows (p. xvi), are based in a wide range of departments and span a number of disciplines: anthropology, communication, criminology, English, humanities, law, linguistics, modern languages, philosophy, social science, sociology and translation studies. As a group, we are truly inter- and cross-disciplinary in composition and often in approach.

After this introductory chapter, the almost encyclopaedic range of topics covered in the remaining 38 chapters is organised into three major sections:

Section I: The language of the law and the legal process

Section II: The linguist as expert in legal processes

Section III: New debates and new directions.

Within each of these sections the reader will find small collections of between four and six chapters, which are arranged according to broad topics, but there are, in fact, as many connections across groups as there are between the chapters in a particular group. For example, the common denominator across the six chapters in the section called ‘Participants in police investigations, interviewing and interrogation’ is a focus on who is talking, but in a sense that link is arbitrary, as the contributors themselves didn’t identify that theme. Instead, it was the editors who made the connection for the benefit of you, the reader, and we now invite you to see the many other connections that can be made. Such is the nature of reading and research; the intellectual activity that enables us to perceive connections between ideas creates new areas of scholarship and, as each of you reads chapters in the multiple combinations that are possible with such an extensive collection, we anticipate a blossoming research landscape in our next and successive springs. We do make many connections for readers between chapters, though, by saying, for example – Archer (this volume) – to help readers locate relevant material as they read. We hope you will go on a journey of discovery and that soon your own work will join the already extensive library of books, chapters, papers, corpora and software in this field.

Section I – The language of the law and the legal process

The Handbook begins with five chapters on legal language in Section 1.1. Though much of the research on legal language focuses on written texts, Holt and Johnson’s chapter takes speech as its subject and puts talk ahead of writing as the primary mode of communication, though talk is intertextually linked and contextualised by a whole array of written texts: statutes, the police Caution and other written texts.

1.1 Legal language

Holt and Johnson’s chapter is one of several in the volume that examines questions. This most characteristic of legal interactional forms accomplishes important institutional work and the chapter, in focusing on formulations, repeating questions and reported speech (both in questions and responses), explores the socio-pragmatic uses of questions in police interviews and trials. Formulation, or ‘saying what has already been said’ in prior talk is an important part of institutional evidence construction, which ‘fixes facts’ for consumption and decision-making by juries. While Holt and Johnson deal with spoken interaction, the chapters by Bhatia, Stygall, Finegan and Cao deal with written legal texts: Bhatia on specification, Stygall on complexity and Finegan on attitude and emphasis. Stygall deals with the real-world problems that readers encounter when they try and fail to understand the implications of pension documents. Her chapter also crosses into the area of linguistic expertise in action, as she reports on how her analysis of complexity reveals some of the comprehension and comprehensibility issues that impact on citizens. Bhatia deals with the other side of the argument: when legislation is simplified or made plainer it can, paradoxically, create perhaps unintended difficulties, since it transfers matters of interpretation to the judiciary rather than the legislature (which represents the people). Finegan focuses on a so far little researched area of the legal register, written opinions or decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, and in particular adverbial expressions of judicial attitude and emphasis in the state of California. Though legal drafters are warned in textbooks against using intensifiers, emphatic adverbs are abundant in Finegan’s COSCO corpus (Corpus of Supreme Court Opinions, consisting of nearly 1 million words) and so he examines this ‘gap’, demonstrating how empirical corpus analysis of judges’ opinions can reveal ‘justice with attitude’. And Cao deals with the practical challenges for translators of private legal documents, domestic statutes and multilateral legal instruments and she illustrates some of the issues arising from complexities in translating laws in bilingual jurisdictions, with examples from Canada (English–French) and Hong Kong SAR (English–Chinese).

1.2 Participants in police investigations, interviewing and interrogation

Section 1.2’s six chapters are concerned with participants in police investigations. In our List of the Conventions used in this Handbook (p.xiv) we list all the participants referred to in the course of this book (e.g. caller, call taker, convicted person, defence lawyer, prosecuting lawyer, interviewee, interviewer, testee, tester, witness) and it therefore seemed appropriate to have a section specifically devoted to participants (in fact we have two, as section 1.4 is devoted solely to lay participants). Drew and Walker focus on the citizen and their telephone interactions with police call handlers as they request assistance in emergency and non-emergency situations, showing how in their use of questions call takers assess whether there is an urgent need (or not) for dispatch of officers to the incident. They show how particular request forms ‘reflect a speaker’s assessment of their entitlement to have a request granted’ and how ‘different forms may be used to display speakers’ knowledge of the contingencies surrounding the granting of a request’ (p. 100). Ainsworth, Rock, Benneworth, Stokoe and Edwards and Haworth all deal with police interviews and interrogations. ‘Interview’ seems the preferred term in the UK with ‘interrogation’ more usual in the US, though Stokoe and Edwards use the term ‘interrogation’.Thedifferent nomenclature partially reflects the different investigative styles used by the police in the two countries, as readers will see, and in attitudes to interviewees, which are revealed in Ainsworth’s disturbing chapter. Ainsworth deals with problems of access to and an effective denial of rights for suspects in the US, while Stokoe and Edwards show how rights are negotiated by suspects and on their behalf, through the support of a lawyer, in interviews where lawyers are successfully accessed and present. Their chapter examines ‘lawyer-initiated actions, responses and interjections including objections to police questioning, advice to clients (both spontaneous and in response to requests), various “repair” operations on officers’ questions, and actions such as questioning clients, and helping them formulate their evidence’ (p. 167) and they show the advantages and disadvantages for the suspect of the varying forms of intervention. Rock’s chapter focuses not only on the suspect but also on witnesses. Like Drew and Walker, she recognises the role of witnesses in the investigative process and focuses in particular on the importance of reading and writing. Though she acknowledges the importance of talk, she establishes the central role of reading and writing practices in the interview ‘showing how these activities figure, how they are oriented to and how influential they are on the structures, practices and outcomes of police interviews’ (p. 126). Benneworth focuses on a particular kind of suspect – paedophiles – and also on the interview itself as an object of study. Her chapter reports on her research, which found that open and closed interviewing styles exist and these produce different evidential effects. Haworth also sees the interview as an evidential object in the judicial process as she explores the different and sometimes competing investigative and evidential functions of the interview and looks at how evidence constructed discursively can be ‘contaminated’ in the process, and this clearly has implications for the suspect. The chapters in this section use conversation analysis, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis approaches.

1.3 Courtroom genres

Section 1.3 moves from the interview room to the courtroom and begins with a historical approach to the courtroom genre by Archer, who maps a changing landscape over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nin...

Table of contents

• Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Conventions used
• List of contributors and affiliations
• Notes on editors and contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Section I The language of the lawand the legal process
• Section II The linguist as expert in legal processes
• Section III New debates and new directions
• References
• Index