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Forensic Linguistics and World Englishes
Abstract
This entry provides the basic principles of forensic linguistics, an area at the intersection of applied linguistics and forensic science, which uses language dynamics as the primary tool to establishing authorship and related concepts. It describes a little of its history as well as its features and uses in everyday life, investigations, and research. It also presents its application to online spaces, its presence in pop culture, and its potential for future use. It concludes with possible common goals to be realized jointly by world Englishes and forensic linguistics.
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Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the streamlining of fact-checking methods, appropriate fake news detection mechanisms have not yet been found. In fact, technological approaches are likely to be inefficient, given that fake news are based mostly on partisanship and identity politics, and not necessarily on outright deception. However, as disinformation is inherently expressed linguistically, this is a privileged room for forensic linguistic analysis. This article builds upon a forensic linguistic analysis of fake news pieces published in English and in Portuguese, which were collected since 2019 from acknowledged fake news outlets. The preliminary empirical analysis reveals that fake news pieces employ particular linguistic features, e.g. at the levels of typography, orthography and spelling, and morphosyntax. The systematic identification of these features, which will allow mapping linguistic resources and patterns used in those contexts, contributes to scholarship, not only by enabling a streamlined development of computational detection systems, but more importantly by permitting the forensic linguistics expert to assist criminal investigations and give evidence in court.
One dimension of human life which become the issue and had been debated is about the used of legal terms which is against the language rules. The use of language and law are often oriented to non-substance issues, namely the used of formal legal terms which is inconsistent with the standard of the Indonesian language. As a result, such a linguistic study does not provide a functional and proportional impact in resolving the problems of the law itself. The study only becomes as an analysis report on the forms of error in the use of language in the realm of law which is expected to be a feedback for improving the quality of the language of law enforcement officers. Accordingly, the empowerment of forensic linguistics as a tool to solve the legal problems becomes important and made a choice in the field of science, especially in the universities. The various cases developing both in domestic and foreign countries have absolutely proven beneficial for forensic linguistic analysis. A lawsuit that comes from speech and transcribed in written language can be a preliminary proof the reporters used. This is also become complaint to the Police. The article examines whether forensic linguistics can be inferred unlawful speech.
Automatic plagiarism detection tools have evolved considerably in recent years. Owing in part to the recent technological developments, which provided more powerful processing capacities, as well as to the research interest that plagiarism detection attracted among computational linguists, results are nowadays more accurate and reliable. However, most of the plagiarism detection systems freely and commercially available are still based on similarity measures, whose algorithms search for similar or, at most, identical strings of text, within a more or less short search distance. Although these methods tend to perform well in detecting literal, verbatim plagiarism, their performance drops when other strategies are used, such as word substitution or reordering. This paper presents the results of a forensic linguistic analysis of real plagiarism cases among higher education students. Comparing the suspect plagiarised strings against the most likely originals from a legal perspective, it is demonstrated that strategies other than literal borrowing are increasingly used to plagiarise. A forensic linguistic explanation of the strategies used and why they represent instances of plagiarism is then offered, and examples are provided to illustrate why existing software fails to detect them. The paper concludes by arguing that commonly used detection software packages can be effective in identifying matching text, but are not necessarily good plagiarism detection systems. More in-depth research and improvements in computational linguistics and natural language processing are required to increase the accuracy and reliability of the machine-detection procedure.
The present study scrutinized a framework and brief overview of the key elements of forensic linguistics covering the discipline, the history and development of it, and the use of linguistic evidence in legal proceedings. Moreover, the typical types of linguistic evidence such as author identification, forensic stylistics, discourse analysis, forensic phonetics, forensic transcription and variation (intra-author and inter-author) are explored. Following a brief introduction to the field that examines some general issues, areas directly related to forensic linguistics are put forward. To this end, a section on document examination, software forensic, semiotics and plagiarism detection are included. Besides, the study pays its attention to some forensic applications of descriptive linguistics such as forensic linguists, text types, author, and the linguistic investigation of authorship. The article concludes by suggesting that lawyers and linguists should work more closely with each other in the interests of justice and that not only should linguists improve their understanding of law issues but also the lawyers should benefit from the hindsight experiences of linguists as consultants and expert witness. The present study also suggest that the future of forensic linguistics will be promising if linguists work on law issues, and also on acquiring qualifications, skills and knowledge in other related disciplines in order to better prepare them for working in and with courts.
While corpus linguistics has existed since the 1960s, Forensic Linguistics is
a relatively new discipline, involving both linguistic evidence in court and wider applications of linguistics to legal texts and discourses. Computer corpora of natural language may be marked up in various ways, grammatically tagged, parsed, lemmatised and analysed with concordance, collocation and other specialist soft ware. In the relatively short history of forensic linguistics, its exponents have oft en employed corpus linguistics techniques in order
to throw light on questions like disputed authorship. However, the corpora employed have been general ones such as the Cobuild “Bank of English”, rather than purpose-built databases of language used in legal contexts, with the result that such research sometimes raises more questions than it answers. Conversely, corpus linguists have from time to time incorporated
data from legal settings into their collections; but they have tended to use these resources as the basis for sociolinguistic or historical linguistic research rather than as a means of exploring topics in language and law. This paper makes a plea for these two fi elds, which are both already cross-disciplinary, to join forces and create a purpose-built corpus for forensic linguistics. It illustrates how corpus techniques may be successfully applied to questions of disputed authorship, citing both hypothetical and actual examples. It ends with an outline of the kinds of texts which a proposed new corpus for Forensic Linguistics should contain and the tools required to exploit it eff ectively.
Words on trial: Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police?
- Hitt J.
The case of Sherlock Holmes and linguistic analysis
- Boucher A.