David Wright

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · School of Arts and Humanities

This paper explores the relationship between weight loss, sex and beauty by analysing a corpus of 285 articles about celebrity weight loss published in the UK national press between 23 March 2020 and 6 July 2020. Taking a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach, we examine the use of the statistically salient lemma flaunt*. Ninety-seve...

When entering the legal system, people bring with them prejudices that they hold about voices. The experiments in this paper focus on perceptions of pitch and articulation rate (AR). We ran two voice rating tasks where listeners judged voices on ten traits and behaviours. Three different 15s samples were taken for three voices and manipulated so th...

Voice identification parades can be unreliable, as earwitness responses are error-prone. In this paper we tested performance across serial and sequential procedures, and varied pre-parade instructions, with the aim of reducing errors. The participants heard a target voice and later attempted to identify it from a parade. In Experiment 1 they were e...

This paper investigates how pronouns were used by UK government speakers to allocate responsibility to themselves and others in all 92 daily televised COVID-19 briefings that were held between March and June 2020. We identified the referent for every use of the first-person plural pronoun (1PL) as ‘inclusive’, ‘exclusive’, or 'ambiguous' and analys...

Historically, there has been less research carried out on earwitness than eyewitness testimony. However, in some cases, earwitness evidence might play an important role in securing a conviction. This paper focuses on accent which is a central characteristic of voices in a forensic linguistic context. The paper focuses on two experiments (Experiment...

This paper is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (the ‘Brexit case’). Courtroom discourse has received substantial research attention in pragmatics, and previous work has largely focused on not...

Covert audio recordings feature in the criminal justice system in a variety of guises, either on their own or accompanied by video. If legally obtained, such recordings can provide important forensic evidence. However, the quality of these potentially valuable evidential recordings is often very poor and their content indistinct, to the extent that...

This paper reports the initial findings from one strand of a multidisciplinary and cross-institutional project called ‘Improving Voice Identification Procedures’ (IVIP) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In light of the potential legal and evidential consequences of accent judgements by witnesses and jurors, the study presen...

This paper reports the analysis of a 26-million-word corpus of data from an online Pick-Up Artist (PUA) discussion forum. PUAs often use discussion forums as a place to share ‘field reports’ of their experiences in seducing and sleeping with women. Such online environments therefore provide a unique communicative space in which the notion of resist...

Voice identification parades can be unreliable, as earwitness responses are error-prone. Here we vary pre-parade instructions, testing performance across serial and sequential procedures to examine ways of reducing errors. The participants listened to a target voice and later attempted to identify it from a parade. They were either warned that the...

Unfamiliar voice identification is error-prone. Whilst the investigation of system variables may indicate ways of boosting earwitness performance, this is an under-researched area. Two experiments were conducted to investigate how methods of presenting voices during a parade affect accuracy and self-rated confidence. In each experiment participants...

Unfamiliar voice identification is error-prone. Whilst the investigation of system variables may indicate ways of boosting earwitness performance, this is an under-researched area. Two experiments were conducted to investigate how methods of presenting voices during a parade affect accuracy and self-rated confidence. In each experiment participants...

Lay-listener descriptions of a perpetrator’s voice can constitute pivotal evidence in criminal investigations. Previous research suggests that voice descriptions tend to be vague and inaccurate. We investigated methods of improving lay-listener voice descriptions in order to develop a procedure for eliciting accurate and admissible earwitness testi...

This article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a...

Purpose Research examining young people’s experiences of harassment has tended to focus on the school and digital environment. Despite street harassment being identified as a common experience for adult women, very few studies have explored adolescents’ experiences of street harassment. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/appr...

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying the writers of anonymous criminal documents. Over the last twenty years, computer scientists have developed a wide range of statistical procedures using a number of different linguistic features to measure similarity between texts. However, much of this work is not of practical use to fo...

Forensic authorship attribution is concerned with identifying authors of disputed or anonymous documents, which are potentially evidential in legal cases, through the analysis of linguistic clues left behind by writers. The forensic linguist “approaches this problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker ha...

Over recent years there has been much theoretical discussion regarding idiolect and its usefulness in forensic authorship analysis. This article, drawing on email data from the former American energy company Enron, offers an empirical investigation into identifying individuals' idiolects through analysing authordistinctive variation within two conv...