{"id":748,"date":"2023-08-31T19:36:10","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T02:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=748"},"modified":"2024-02-13T12:31:58","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T20:31:58","slug":"coppers-codes-and-curses-the-fascinating-field-of-forensic-linguistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=748","title":{"rendered":"Coppers, codes, and curses: The fascinating field of forensic linguistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Summoning all crime show, film noir, and detective fiction junkies!<\/p>\n<p>Before continuing on the child language journey (with part II in <a href=\"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=733\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this series<\/a>), we\u2019re taking a quick and quizzically unrelated detour. I want to recommend a <strong>forensic linguistics<\/strong> podcast that I\u2019ve been listening to, called <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/enclair\/listen\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">EN CLAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s produced by Dr. Claire Hardaker, who is a forensic corpus linguist at Lancaster University in Northwest England. In her own words, a <strong>forensic corpus linguist <\/strong>is someone \u201cwho looks at large criminal or legal linguistic datasets. For example, this might be a million tweets of online abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Claire\u2019s summary of her podcast:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEn clair is a casebook of forensic linguistic cases, literary detection, and language mysteries. It also looks at codes, cryptography, undeciphered languages, and linguistic myths and legends. Each episode presents a case of linguistic intrigue or controversy from ancient history to the present day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve listened to episodes on the Pendle Witch Trials, on messages hidden in music, on the Elliott vs. Google trademark case (where I learned the amazing term <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thoughtco.com\/genericide-nouns-term-1690891\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">genericide<\/a><\/em><a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a>), and to miniseries on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Enigma_machine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Enigma<\/a> (the WWII mechanical cipher device) and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peter_Sutcliffe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yorkshire Ripper<\/a>. It\u2019s very intriguing stuff.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A short background on the field in general:<\/p>\n<p>Forensic linguistics applies linguistic expertise to the investigation of crimes, judicial procedure, and the law.<\/p>\n<p>Examples of the kinds of things that forensic linguists work on (often in the context of criminal cases, but also for civil cases or other legal scenarios):<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]<\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Text authorship<\/strong> (or <strong>forensic stylistics<\/strong>) \u2013\n<ul>\n<li>Determining the author of a text, by comparing it to a suspect\u2019s known writing.<\/li>\n<li>Text types can range from letters, books, suicide notes, confessions, phone texts, and social media, to insurance fraud case documents and ransom demands.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Voice identification<\/strong> (or <strong>forensic phonetics<\/strong>) \u2013\n<ul>\n<li>Deals with the acoustics of the voice in recorded speech, and determining whether transcriptions of recordings are accurate.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Discourse analysis<\/strong> \u2013\n<ul>\n<li>Analyzing written or (recorded) oral language, to make deductions relevant to a case based on discourse structure and markers \u2013 such as who introduces topics, who interrupts and when, or <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Backchannel_(linguistics)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">backchanneling<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dialectology<\/strong> \u2013\n<ul>\n<li>Determining a person\u2019s dialect, often to differentiate a suspect\u2019s speech from incriminating recordings.<\/li>\n<li>Used in the Yorkshire Ripper case (during investigation of the now-known-to-be-hoax<a href=\"#_ftn3\" name=\"_ftnref3\">[3]<\/a> tapes).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Trademark \/ intellectual property cases<\/strong> \u2013\n<ul>\n<li>Examining disputes over trademarks, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Famous cases include McDonald\u2019s defense of its protected \u201cMc\u201d prefix, and the Google case I referred to above (wherein Google defended its trademarked name against accusations that verb use of the world <em>google <\/em>had come to mean, generically, \u201csearch the internet\u201d).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a> Which, I just realized upon trying to link the word to a dictionary entry, hasn\u2019t yet been added to either dictionary.com or merriam-webster.com.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">[2]<\/a> I\u2019ve culled and consolidated these categories from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.languageandlaw.org\/FORENSIC.HTM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.languageandlaw.org\/FORENSIC.HTM<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Forensic_linguistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Forensic_linguistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref3\" name=\"_ftn3\">[3]<\/a> The podcast goes into detail on this, but the two linguists \/ dialectologists who analyzed the tapes tried to convince police that the tapes came from someone other than the Yorkshire Ripper \u2013 they were right, but police ignored their arguments.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>*Photo attribution: <a href=\"https:\/\/flickr.com\/photos\/kimmomurmu\/52689678359\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cLights, fog and darkness\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summoning all crime show, film noir, and detective fiction junkies! Before continuing on the child language journey (with part II in this series), we\u2019re taking a quick and quizzically unrelated detour. I want to recommend a forensic linguistics podcast that I\u2019ve been listening to, called EN CLAIR. It\u2019s produced by Dr. Claire Hardaker, who is&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[232,231,233,234],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crime","tag-forensic-linguistics","tag-law","tag-podcasts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Coppers, codes, and curses: The fascinating field of forensic linguistics - 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