Forensic linguistics
Encyclopedia
Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic
knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic
context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics
. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence. The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogenous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field.
During the early days of forensic linguistics in the United Kingdom
, the legal defense for many criminal cases questioned the authenticity of police statements. At the time, customary police procedure for taking suspects' statements dictated that it be in a specific format, rather than in the suspect's own words. Statements by witnesses are very seldom made in a coherent or orderly fashion, with speculation and backtracking done out loud. The delivery is often too fast-paced, causing important details to be left out. Aston University
in Birmingham has an established Centre for Forensic Linguistics.
Early work of forensic linguistics in the United States
concerned the rights of individuals with regard to understanding their Miranda rights during the interrogation process. An early application of forensic linguistics in the United States was related to the status of trademarks as words or phrases in the language. One of the bigger cases involved fastfood giant McDonald's
claiming that it had originated the process of attaching unprotected words to the 'Mc' prefix and was unhappy with Quality Inns International's intention of opening a chain of economy hotels to be called 'McSleep.'
In the 1980s, Australian linguists discussed the application of linguistics and sociolinguistics to legal issues. They discovered that a phrase such as ' the same language ' is open to interpretation. Aboriginal people have their own understanding and use of 'English', something that is not always appreciated by speakers of the dominant version of English, i.e., 'white English'. The Aboriginal people also bring their own culturally based, interactional styles to the interview.
on the development of the English common law, and the evolution of the legal specifics associated with it. It can also refer to the ongoing attempts at making legal language
more comprehensible to laypeople.
Urgency plays a role in emergency calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns. The recipient trusts the caller to provide accurate information and the caller trusts the recipient to ask only pertinent questions. If the caller uses a rising pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent a lack of commitment; the recipient's use of a rising pitch indicates doubt or desire for clarification. The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to a maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time. This makes the emergency call unlike any other kind of service encounter.
, where the first ransom note (sometimes referred to as called the Nursery Note) stated: "We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Polise the child is in gut care.[sic]". From the sentence, the kidnapper makes the claim that the child is in good hands but to make such a claim, the note would have to be written before the perpetrator enters the premises. Therefore, the claim is false since the kidnapper had not even encountered the child when he wrote the note.
Specialist databases of samples of spoken and written natural language (called corpora
) are now frequently used by forensic linguists. These include corpora of suicide notes, mobile phone texts, police statements, police interview records and witness statements. They are used to analyse language, understand how it is used, and to reduce the effort needed to identify words that tend to occur near each other (collocations or collocates).
, or particular patterns of language use (vocabulary, collocations, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etc). The idiolect is a theoretical construct based on the idea that there is linguistic variation at the group level and hence there may also be linguistic variation at the individual level. William Labov
has stated that nobody has found a "homogenous data" in idiolects, and there are many reasons why it is difficult to provide such evidence.
Firstly, language is not an inherited property, but one which is socially acquired. Because acquisition is continuous and life-long, an individual's use of language is always susceptible to variation from a variety of sources, including other speakers, the media and macro-social changes. Education can have a profoundly homogenizing effect on language use. Research into authorship identification is ongoing. The term authorship attribution is now felt to be too deterministic.
The paucity of documents (ransom notes, threatening letters, etc) in most criminal cases in a forensic setting means there is often too little text upon which to base a reliable identification. However, the information provided may be adequate to eliminate a suspect as an author or narrow down an author from a small group of suspects.
Authorship measures that analysts use include word length average, average number of syllables per word, article
frequency, type-token ratio, punctuation (both in terms of overall density and syntactic boundaries) and the measurements of hapax legomena (unique words in a text). Statistical approaches include factor analysis
, Bayesian statistics
, Poisson distribution
, multivariate analysis
, and discriminant function analysis
of function words.
The Cusum (Cumulative Sum) method for text analysis has also been developed. Cusum analysis works even on short texts and relies on the assumption that each speaker has a unique set of habits, thus rendering no significant difference between their speech and writing. Speakers tend to utilize two to three letter words in a sentence and their utterances tend to include vowel-initial words.
In order to carry out the Cusum test on habits of utilizing two to three letter words and vowel-initial words in a sentential clause, the occurrences of each type of word in the text must be identified and the distribution plotted in each sentence. The Cusum distribution for these two habits will be compared with the average sentence length of the text. The two sets of values should track each other. Any altered section of the text would show a distinct discrepancy between the values of the two reference points. The tampered section will exhibit a different pattern from the rest of the text.
.
One of the earliest cases where forensic stylistics was used to detect plagiarism
was the case of Helen Keller
's short story. The blind American author was accused of plagiarism
in 1892 with regard to her published short story, The Frost King. Upon investigation, The Frost King was found to have been plagiarised from Margaret Canby's book Frost Fairies which had been read to her some time ago. Keller was discovered to have made only minute changes to common words and phrases and used less common words to put the same point across, suggesting mere alterations to original ideas.
Keller used 'vast wealth' instead of 'treasure' (approximately 230 times less common in the language) 'bethought' instead of 'concluded' (approximately 450 times less common), 'bade them' instead of 'told them' (approximately 30 times less common). Keller used the phrase 'ever since that time' whilst Canby chose 'from that time' (the latter 50 times more common than the former). Keller also used ' I cannot imagine' whereas Canby used ' I do not know'. 'Know' is approximately ten times more common than 'imagine'.
Keller relied on a lexis that is less common when compared to Canby's. The Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid readability test showed that Canby's text showing more originality compared to Keller's. Canby's text obtained a higher grade on the reading ease scale compared to Keller's. The distinctions between Keller and Canby's text are at the lexical and phrasal level.
Other examples of plagiarism include the cases between Richard Condon
, author of The Manchurian Candidate
and English novelist Robert Graves
; and between Martin Luther King Jr and Archibald Carey.
Judging by the text in The Manchurian Candidate
, Condon's work is seen to be rich in clichés such as "in his superstitious heart of hearts." While Helen Keller
took pride in using rare phrases and avoids common source words, Condon was fond of expanding existing words into phrases and existing phrases into more extensive ones. Condon was also found to have borrowed from a wide range of Graves' work.
In the plagiarism case of Martin Luther King Jr, almost half of his doctoral dissertation was discovered to have been copied from another theology student. King simply changed the names of the mountains and used much more alliteration
and assonance
.
Carey's and Graves' texts (source texts) were noticeably shorter, pithier and simpler in structure while Condon's and King's texts relied on 'purple' devices, extending the existing text and flourish their language significantly.
deals with analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event. According to the method, the close analysis of a covert recording can produce useful deductions. The use of 'I' instead of 'We' in a recording highlights non-complicity in a conspiracy. The utterance of 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' as responses indicate that the suspect understands the suggestion, while feedback markers such as 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' do not denote the suspect's agreement to the suggestion. Discourse analysts are not always allowed to testify but during preparation for a case they are often useful to lawyers.
Dialectology was used during the investigations into the Yorkshire Ripper tape hoax
.
A man accused of manufacturing the drug Ecstasy was mis-heard by the police transcriber as 'hallucinogenic'
The police transcriber heard "but if it's as you say it's hallucinogenic, it's in the Sigma catalogue." However, the actual utterance was "but if it's as you say it's German, it's in the Sigma catalogue."
Another disputed utterance was between a police officer and a suspect. One of the topics of conversation was a third man known as 'Ernie'. The poor signal of the recording made 'Ernie' sound like 'Ronnie'. The surveillance tape presented acoustic problems- an intrusive electronic-sounding cackle, the sound of the car engine, the playing of the car radio, the movement of the target vehicle, and the intrusive noise coincided with the first syllable of the disputed name.
; the authorship of letters to an Internet child pornography service; the contemporaneity of an arsonist's diary; the comparison between a set of mobile phone texts and a suspect's police interview, and the reconstruction of a mobile phone text conversation. Some well-known examples include an appeal against the conviction of Derek Bentley
and the identification of Theodore Kaczynski
as the so-called "Unabomber".
The criminal laboratories Bundeskriminalamt (in Germany
) and the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut (in the Netherlands
) both employ forensic linguists.
Forensic linguistics contributed to the overturning of Derek Bentley
's conviction for murder in 1998 although there were other non-linguistic issues. Nineteen-year-old Bentley, who was functionally illiterate
, had been hanged in 1953 for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles; he had been convicted partly on the basis of his statement to police, allegedly transcribed verbatim from a spoken monologue
. When the case was reopened, a forensic linguist found that the frequency and usage of the word "then" in police transcripts suggested the transcripts were not verbatim statements but had been partially authored by police interviewers; this and other evidence led to Bentley's posthumous pardon.
In the case of Theodore Kaczynski
, who was eventually convicted of being the "Unabomber", family members recognized his writing style from the published 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), and notified the authorities. FBI agents searching Kaczynski's hut found hundreds of documents written by Kaczynski but not published anywhere. An analysis produced by FBI Supervisory Special Agent James R. Fitzgerald identified numerous lexical items and phrases common to the two documents. Some were more distinctive than others, but the prosecution argued that even the more common words and phrases being used by Kaczynski became distinctive when used in combination with each other.
Forensic linguistic evidence also played a role in the investigation of the 2005 disappearance of Julie Turner, a 40-year-old woman living in Yorkshire
. After she was reported missing, her partner received several text messages from Julie's mobile phone, such as "Stopping at jills, back later need to sort my head out", and "Tell kids not to worry. sorting my life out. (sic) be in touch to get some things". Investigators found that letters written by Turner's friend Howard Simmerson shared several unusual orthographic and punctuation features with the text messages, suggesting that Simmerson had been aware of the contents of the messages. Simmerson was eventually found guilty of Turner's murder.
Forensic linguist John Olsson gave evidence in a murder trial on the meaning of 'jooking' in connection with a stabbing.
During the appeal against the conviction of the Bridgewater Four
, the forensic linguist examined the written confession of Patrick Molloy, one of the defendants — a confession which he had retracted immediately — and a written record of an interview which the police claimed took place immediately before the confession was dictated. Molloy denied that the interview had ever taken place, and the analysis indicated that the answers in the interview were not consistent with the questions being asked. The linguist came to the conclusion that the interview had been fabricated by police. The conviction against the Bridgewater Four was quashed before the linguist in the case, Malcolm Coulthard, could produce his evidence.
In an Australian case reported by Eagleson, a "farewell letter" had apparently been written by a woman prior to her disappearance. The letter was compared with a sample of her previous writing and that of her husband. Eagleson came to the conclusion that the letter had been written by the husband of the missing woman, who subsequently confessed to having written it and to having killed his wife. The features analysed included sentence breaks, marked
themes
, and deletion of prepositions.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic
Forensics
Forensic science is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to a legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or a civil action...
context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics
Applied linguistics
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems...
. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence. The discipline of forensic linguistics is not homogenous; it involves a range of experts and researchers in different areas of the field.
History
The phrase forensic linguistics first appeared in 1968 when Jan Svartvik, a linguistics professor, used it in an analysis of statements by Timothy John Evans.During the early days of forensic linguistics in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, the legal defense for many criminal cases questioned the authenticity of police statements. At the time, customary police procedure for taking suspects' statements dictated that it be in a specific format, rather than in the suspect's own words. Statements by witnesses are very seldom made in a coherent or orderly fashion, with speculation and backtracking done out loud. The delivery is often too fast-paced, causing important details to be left out. Aston University
Aston University
Aston University is a "plate glass" campus university situated at Gosta Green, in the city centre of Birmingham, England.Established in 1895 as the Birmingham Municipal Technical School, Aston was granted its Royal Charter as Aston University on 22 April 1966...
in Birmingham has an established Centre for Forensic Linguistics.
Early work of forensic linguistics in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
concerned the rights of individuals with regard to understanding their Miranda rights during the interrogation process. An early application of forensic linguistics in the United States was related to the status of trademarks as words or phrases in the language. One of the bigger cases involved fastfood giant McDonald's
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...
claiming that it had originated the process of attaching unprotected words to the 'Mc' prefix and was unhappy with Quality Inns International's intention of opening a chain of economy hotels to be called 'McSleep.'
In the 1980s, Australian linguists discussed the application of linguistics and sociolinguistics to legal issues. They discovered that a phrase such as ' the same language ' is open to interpretation. Aboriginal people have their own understanding and use of 'English', something that is not always appreciated by speakers of the dominant version of English, i.e., 'white English'. The Aboriginal people also bring their own culturally based, interactional styles to the interview.
Areas of study
The range of topics within forensic linguistics is diverse, but research occurs in the following areas:The language of legal texts
The study of the language of legal texts encompasses a wide range of forensic texts. That includes the study of text types and forms of analysis. Any text or item of spoken language can potentially be a forensic text when it is used in a legal or criminal context. This includes analysing the linguistics of documents as diverse as Acts of Parliament (or other law-making body), private wills, court judgements and summonses and the statutes of other bodies, such as States and government departments. One important area is that of the transformative effect of Norman French and Ecclesiastic LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
on the development of the English common law, and the evolution of the legal specifics associated with it. It can also refer to the ongoing attempts at making legal language
Legal writing
Legal writing is a type of technical writing used by lawyers, judges, legislators, and others in law to express legal analysis and legal rights and duties.- Authority :...
more comprehensible to laypeople.
The language of legal processes
Among other things, this area examines language as it is used in cross-examination, evidence presentation, judge's direction, police cautions, police testimonies in court, summing up to a jury, interview techniques, the questioning process in court and in other areas such as police interviews.Emergency call
In an emergency call, the recipient or emergency operator's ability to extract primarily linguistic information in threatening situations and to come up with the required response in a timely manner is crucial to the successful completion of the call. Intonational emphasis, voice pitch and the extent to which there is cooperation between the caller and the recipient at any one time are also very important in analysing an emergency call. Full cooperation includes frank and timely responses.Urgency plays a role in emergency calls, so hesitations, signs of evasiveness, and incomplete or overly short answers indicate that the caller might be making a false or hoax call. A genuine call has distinctive interlocking and slight overlap of turns. The recipient trusts the caller to provide accurate information and the caller trusts the recipient to ask only pertinent questions. If the caller uses a rising pitch at the end of every turn, it might represent a lack of commitment; the recipient's use of a rising pitch indicates doubt or desire for clarification. The call ideally moves from nil knowledge on the part of the recipient to a maximum amount of knowledge in a minimum possible period of time. This makes the emergency call unlike any other kind of service encounter.
Ransom demands or other threat communication
Threat is a counterpart of a promise and is an important feature in a ransom demand. Ransom demands are also examined to identify between genuine and false threats. An example of a ransom note analysis can be seen in the case of the Lindbergh kidnappingLindbergh kidnapping
The kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was the abduction of the son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The toddler, 18 months old at the time, was abducted from his family home in East Amwell, New Jersey, near the town of Hopewell, New Jersey, on the evening of...
, where the first ransom note (sometimes referred to as called the Nursery Note) stated: "We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the Polise the child is in gut care.[sic]". From the sentence, the kidnapper makes the claim that the child is in good hands but to make such a claim, the note would have to be written before the perpetrator enters the premises. Therefore, the claim is false since the kidnapper had not even encountered the child when he wrote the note.
Suicide letters
A suicide note is typically brief, concise and highly propositional with a degree of evasiveness. A credible suicide letter must be making a definite unequivocal proposition in a situational context. The proposition of genuine suicide is thematic, directed to the addressee (or addressees) and relevant to the relationship between them. Suicide notes generally have sentences alluding to the act of killing oneself, or the method of suicide that was undertaken. The contents of a suicide note could be intended to make the addressee suffer or feel guilt. Genuine suicide letters are short, typically less than 300 words in length. Extraneous or irrelevant material are often excluded from the text.Death row statements
Death row statements either admit the crime, leaving the witness with an impression of honesty and forthrightness; or deny the crime, leaving the witness with an impression of innocence. They may also denounce witnesses as dishonest, critique law enforcement as corrupt in an attempt to portray innocence or seek an element of revenge in their last moments Olsson (2004). Death row statements are within the heavily institutionalized setting of death row prisons.Use of linguistic evidence in legal proceedings
These areas of application have varying degrees of acceptability or reliability within the field. Linguists have provided evidence in:- TrademarkTrademarkA trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
and other intellectual property disputes - Disputes of meaning and use
- Author identification (determining who wrote an anonymous text by making comparisons to known writing samples of a suspect; such as threat letters, mobile phone texts or emails)
- Forensic stylistics (identifying cases of plagiarismPlagiarismPlagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
) - Voice identification, also known as forensic phonetics, used to determine, through acoustic qualities, if the voice on a tape recorder is that of the defendant)
- Discourse analysisDiscourse analysisDiscourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....
(the analysis of the structure of written or spoken utterance to determine who is introducing topics or whether a suspect is agreeing to engage in criminal conspiracy) - Language analysis (forensic dialectologyDialectologyDialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...
) tracing the linguistic history of asylum seekers (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin) - Reconstruction of mobile phone text conversations
- Forensic phonetics
Specialist databases of samples of spoken and written natural language (called corpora
Text corpus
In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...
) are now frequently used by forensic linguists. These include corpora of suicide notes, mobile phone texts, police statements, police interview records and witness statements. They are used to analyse language, understand how it is used, and to reduce the effort needed to identify words that tend to occur near each other (collocations or collocates).
Author identification
The identification of whether a given individual said or wrote something relies on analysis of their idiolectIdiolect
In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection , grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique...
, or particular patterns of language use (vocabulary, collocations, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etc). The idiolect is a theoretical construct based on the idea that there is linguistic variation at the group level and hence there may also be linguistic variation at the individual level. William Labov
William Labov
William Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
has stated that nobody has found a "homogenous data" in idiolects, and there are many reasons why it is difficult to provide such evidence.
Firstly, language is not an inherited property, but one which is socially acquired. Because acquisition is continuous and life-long, an individual's use of language is always susceptible to variation from a variety of sources, including other speakers, the media and macro-social changes. Education can have a profoundly homogenizing effect on language use. Research into authorship identification is ongoing. The term authorship attribution is now felt to be too deterministic.
The paucity of documents (ransom notes, threatening letters, etc) in most criminal cases in a forensic setting means there is often too little text upon which to base a reliable identification. However, the information provided may be adequate to eliminate a suspect as an author or narrow down an author from a small group of suspects.
Authorship measures that analysts use include word length average, average number of syllables per word, article
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
frequency, type-token ratio, punctuation (both in terms of overall density and syntactic boundaries) and the measurements of hapax legomena (unique words in a text). Statistical approaches include factor analysis
Factor analysis
Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved, uncorrelated variables called factors. In other words, it is possible, for example, that variations in three or four observed variables...
, Bayesian statistics
Bayesian statistics
Bayesian statistics is that subset of the entire field of statistics in which the evidence about the true state of the world is expressed in terms of degrees of belief or, more specifically, Bayesian probabilities...
, Poisson distribution
Poisson distribution
In probability theory and statistics, the Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since...
, multivariate analysis
Multivariate analysis
Multivariate analysis is based on the statistical principle of multivariate statistics, which involves observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable at a time...
, and discriminant function analysis
Discriminant function analysis
Discriminant function analysis is a statistical analysis to predict a categorical dependent variable by one or more continuous or binary independent variables. It is different from an ANOVA or MANOVA, which is used to predict one or multiple continuous dependent variables by one or more...
of function words.
The Cusum (Cumulative Sum) method for text analysis has also been developed. Cusum analysis works even on short texts and relies on the assumption that each speaker has a unique set of habits, thus rendering no significant difference between their speech and writing. Speakers tend to utilize two to three letter words in a sentence and their utterances tend to include vowel-initial words.
In order to carry out the Cusum test on habits of utilizing two to three letter words and vowel-initial words in a sentential clause, the occurrences of each type of word in the text must be identified and the distribution plotted in each sentence. The Cusum distribution for these two habits will be compared with the average sentence length of the text. The two sets of values should track each other. Any altered section of the text would show a distinct discrepancy between the values of the two reference points. The tampered section will exhibit a different pattern from the rest of the text.
Forensic stylistics
This discipline subjects written or spoken materials (or both), to scientific analysis for determination and measurement of content, meaning, speaker identification, or determination of authorship, in identifying plagiarismPlagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
.
One of the earliest cases where forensic stylistics was used to detect plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
was the case of Helen Keller
Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....
's short story. The blind American author was accused of plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
in 1892 with regard to her published short story, The Frost King. Upon investigation, The Frost King was found to have been plagiarised from Margaret Canby's book Frost Fairies which had been read to her some time ago. Keller was discovered to have made only minute changes to common words and phrases and used less common words to put the same point across, suggesting mere alterations to original ideas.
Keller used 'vast wealth' instead of 'treasure' (approximately 230 times less common in the language) 'bethought' instead of 'concluded' (approximately 450 times less common), 'bade them' instead of 'told them' (approximately 30 times less common). Keller used the phrase 'ever since that time' whilst Canby chose 'from that time' (the latter 50 times more common than the former). Keller also used ' I cannot imagine' whereas Canby used ' I do not know'. 'Know' is approximately ten times more common than 'imagine'.
Keller relied on a lexis that is less common when compared to Canby's. The Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid readability test showed that Canby's text showing more originality compared to Keller's. Canby's text obtained a higher grade on the reading ease scale compared to Keller's. The distinctions between Keller and Canby's text are at the lexical and phrasal level.
Other examples of plagiarism include the cases between Richard Condon
Richard Condon
Richard Thomas Condon was a prolific and popular American political novelist whose satiric works were generally presented in the form of thrillers or semi-thrillers...
, author of The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate , by Richard Condon, is a political thriller novel about the son of a prominent US political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for the Communist Party....
and English novelist Robert Graves
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
; and between Martin Luther King Jr and Archibald Carey.
Judging by the text in The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate , by Richard Condon, is a political thriller novel about the son of a prominent US political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for the Communist Party....
, Condon's work is seen to be rich in clichés such as "in his superstitious heart of hearts." While Helen Keller
Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....
took pride in using rare phrases and avoids common source words, Condon was fond of expanding existing words into phrases and existing phrases into more extensive ones. Condon was also found to have borrowed from a wide range of Graves' work.
In the plagiarism case of Martin Luther King Jr, almost half of his doctoral dissertation was discovered to have been copied from another theology student. King simply changed the names of the mountains and used much more alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
and assonance
Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...
.
Carey's and Graves' texts (source texts) were noticeably shorter, pithier and simpler in structure while Condon's and King's texts relied on 'purple' devices, extending the existing text and flourish their language significantly.
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysisDiscourse analysis
Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....
deals with analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event. According to the method, the close analysis of a covert recording can produce useful deductions. The use of 'I' instead of 'We' in a recording highlights non-complicity in a conspiracy. The utterance of 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' as responses indicate that the suspect understands the suggestion, while feedback markers such as 'yeah' and 'uh-huh' do not denote the suspect's agreement to the suggestion. Discourse analysts are not always allowed to testify but during preparation for a case they are often useful to lawyers.
Linguistic dialectology
This refers to the study of dialects in a methodological manner based on anthropological information. It is becoming more important to conduct systematic studies of dialects, especially within the English language, because they are no longer as distinct as they once were due to the onslaught of mass media and population mobility. Political and social issues have also caused languages to straddle geographical borders resulting in certain language varieties spoken in multiple countries, leading to complications when determining an individual's origin by means of his/her language or dialect.Dialectology was used during the investigations into the Yorkshire Ripper tape hoax
Wearside Jack
Wearside Jack is the nickname given to John Samuel Humble , a hoaxer who pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in the late 1970s. In 2006 he was convicted for perverting the course of justice.-Taunting letters:...
.
Forensic phonetics
The forensic phonetician is concerned with the production of accurate transcriptions of what was being said. Transcriptions can reveal information about a speaker's social and regional background. Forensic phonetics can determine similarities between the speakers of two or more separate recordings. Voice recording as a supplement to the transcription can be useful as it allows victims and witnesses to indicate whether the voice of a suspect is that of the criminal.A man accused of manufacturing the drug Ecstasy was mis-heard by the police transcriber as 'hallucinogenic'
The police transcriber heard "but if it's as you say it's hallucinogenic, it's in the Sigma catalogue." However, the actual utterance was "but if it's as you say it's German, it's in the Sigma catalogue."
Another disputed utterance was between a police officer and a suspect. One of the topics of conversation was a third man known as 'Ernie'. The poor signal of the recording made 'Ernie' sound like 'Ronnie'. The surveillance tape presented acoustic problems- an intrusive electronic-sounding cackle, the sound of the car engine, the playing of the car radio, the movement of the target vehicle, and the intrusive noise coincided with the first syllable of the disputed name.
Examples
Evidence from forensic linguistics has more power to eliminate someone as a suspect than to prove him or her guilty. Linguistic expertise has been employed in criminal cases to defend an individual suspected of a crime, and during government investigations. Forensic linguists have given expert evidence in a wide variety of cases, including abuse of process, where police statements were found to be too similar to have been independently produced by police officers; the authorship of hate mailHate mail
Hate mail is a form of harassment, usually consisting of invective and potentially intimidating or threatening comments towards the recipient...
; the authorship of letters to an Internet child pornography service; the contemporaneity of an arsonist's diary; the comparison between a set of mobile phone texts and a suspect's police interview, and the reconstruction of a mobile phone text conversation. Some well-known examples include an appeal against the conviction of Derek Bentley
Derek Bentley
Derek William Bentley was a British teenager hanged for the murder of a police officer, committed in the course of a burglary attempt. The murder of the police officer was committed by a friend and accomplice of Bentley's, Christopher Craig, then aged 16. Bentley was convicted as a party to the...
and the identification of Theodore Kaczynski
Theodore Kaczynski
Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski , also known as the "Unabomber" , is an American mathematician, social critic, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois,...
as the so-called "Unabomber".
The criminal laboratories Bundeskriminalamt (in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
) and the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut (in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
) both employ forensic linguists.
Forensic linguistics contributed to the overturning of Derek Bentley
Derek Bentley
Derek William Bentley was a British teenager hanged for the murder of a police officer, committed in the course of a burglary attempt. The murder of the police officer was committed by a friend and accomplice of Bentley's, Christopher Craig, then aged 16. Bentley was convicted as a party to the...
's conviction for murder in 1998 although there were other non-linguistic issues. Nineteen-year-old Bentley, who was functionally illiterate
Functional illiteracy
Functional illiteracy is a term used to describe reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level." Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or...
, had been hanged in 1953 for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles; he had been convicted partly on the basis of his statement to police, allegedly transcribed verbatim from a spoken monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
. When the case was reopened, a forensic linguist found that the frequency and usage of the word "then" in police transcripts suggested the transcripts were not verbatim statements but had been partially authored by police interviewers; this and other evidence led to Bentley's posthumous pardon.
In the case of Theodore Kaczynski
Theodore Kaczynski
Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski , also known as the "Unabomber" , is an American mathematician, social critic, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois,...
, who was eventually convicted of being the "Unabomber", family members recognized his writing style from the published 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), and notified the authorities. FBI agents searching Kaczynski's hut found hundreds of documents written by Kaczynski but not published anywhere. An analysis produced by FBI Supervisory Special Agent James R. Fitzgerald identified numerous lexical items and phrases common to the two documents. Some were more distinctive than others, but the prosecution argued that even the more common words and phrases being used by Kaczynski became distinctive when used in combination with each other.
Forensic linguistic evidence also played a role in the investigation of the 2005 disappearance of Julie Turner, a 40-year-old woman living in Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
. After she was reported missing, her partner received several text messages from Julie's mobile phone, such as "Stopping at jills, back later need to sort my head out", and "Tell kids not to worry. sorting my life out. (sic) be in touch to get some things". Investigators found that letters written by Turner's friend Howard Simmerson shared several unusual orthographic and punctuation features with the text messages, suggesting that Simmerson had been aware of the contents of the messages. Simmerson was eventually found guilty of Turner's murder.
Forensic linguist John Olsson gave evidence in a murder trial on the meaning of 'jooking' in connection with a stabbing.
During the appeal against the conviction of the Bridgewater Four
Bridgewater Four
The Bridgewater Four was the collective name given to the quartet of men who were tried and found guilty of killing 13 year old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, who was shot in the head at close range. After 18 years their convictions were overturned...
, the forensic linguist examined the written confession of Patrick Molloy, one of the defendants — a confession which he had retracted immediately — and a written record of an interview which the police claimed took place immediately before the confession was dictated. Molloy denied that the interview had ever taken place, and the analysis indicated that the answers in the interview were not consistent with the questions being asked. The linguist came to the conclusion that the interview had been fabricated by police. The conviction against the Bridgewater Four was quashed before the linguist in the case, Malcolm Coulthard, could produce his evidence.
In an Australian case reported by Eagleson, a "farewell letter" had apparently been written by a woman prior to her disappearance. The letter was compared with a sample of her previous writing and that of her husband. Eagleson came to the conclusion that the letter had been written by the husband of the missing woman, who subsequently confessed to having written it and to having killed his wife. The features analysed included sentence breaks, marked
Markedness
Markedness is a specific kind of asymmetry relationship between elements of linguistic or conceptual structure. In a marked-unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one...
themes
Thematic role
Thematic role is a linguistic notion, which may refer to:* Theta role * Thematic relation...
, and deletion of prepositions.
Linguistic fingerprinting
A linguistic fingerprint is a concept put forward by some scholars that each human being uses language differently, and that this difference between people involves a collection of markers which stamps a speaker/writer as unique; similar to a fingerprint. Under this view, it is assumed that every individual uses languages differently and this difference can be observed as a fingerprint. It is formed as a result of merged language style. A person's linguistic fingerprint can be reconstructed from the individual's daily interactions and relate to a variety of self-reported personality characteristics, situational variables and physiological markers (eg. blood pressure, cortisol, testosterone). In the process of an investigation, the emphasis should be on the relative rather than absolute difference between the authors and how investigators can classify their texts. John Olsson, however, argues that although the concept of linguistic fingerprinting is attractive to law enforcement agencies, there is so far little hard evidence to support the notion.Variation
Intra-author variations are the ways in which one author's texts differ from each other. Inter-author variations are the ways in which different authors' writing varies. Two texts by one author do not necessarily vary less than texts by two different authors.- Genre: When texts are being measured in different genres, considerable variation is observed even though they are by the same author.
- Text Type: Personal letters contain more inter-relationship bonding strategies than academic articles or term papers.
- Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Some fiction writers are journalists. Due to the different demands of each medium, they can be completely different from one another and this results in intra-author variation.
- Private vs Public: A politician writing a political speech, which is a public text, will differ greatly from a private text to a friend or family member.
- Time lapse as a cause of variation: The greater the time lapse between two works, the greater the likely variation. Language changes more than we realize in a relatively short span of time, influencing our susceptibility to language changes around us.
- Disguise as a sort of variation: A writer can publish anonymously, hence disguising output to prevent recognition.
Forensic transcription
The two main types of transcriptions are written documents and video and audio records. Accurate, reliable text transcription is important because the text is the data which becomes the available evidence. If a transcription is wrong, the evidence is altered. If there is failure to transcribe the full text, evidence is once again altered unwittingly. There must be emphasis on the text being the evidence. A transcription of an audio file should never be assumed to be completely accurate. Each type of transcription contains its own problems. A handwritten document might contain unusual spellings which may result in ambiguous meanings, illegible handwriting and illustrations that are difficult to comprehend. A scanned document is tricky, as it may alter the original document. Audio and video documents can include repetitions, hesitation, nonsensical talk, jargon which can be hard to understand and speakers mumbling incoherently and inaudibly. Non-linguistic sounds such as crying and laughing may also be included in the audio and video text which cannot be transcribed easily. Because of this, civil libertarians argued that interrogations in major criminal cases should be recorded and the recordings kept, as well as transcribed.See also
- Forensic science
- The International Association of Forensic LinguistsInternational Association of Forensic LinguistsThe International Association of Forensic Linguists is a professional organization consisting primarily of linguists working in fields related to the area of language and law, or forensic linguistics. Areas of expertise include authorship attribution, disputed confessions, trademark issues, legal...
(IAFL) - StylometryStylometryStylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents...
(authorship analysis) - WriteprintWriteprintWriteprint is a term proposed by some forensic linguistics researchers to denote a set of distinguishing stylometric characteristics of a written text such as "vocabulary richness, length of sentence, use of function words, layout of paragraphs, and key words" which allow one to identify its...
Further reading
- Baldwin, J. R. and P. French (1990). Forensic phonetics. London: Pinter Publishers.
- Ellis,S. (1994). 'Case report: The Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, Part 1', Forensic Linguistics 1, ii, 197-206
- Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, London: Longman.
- Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic Linguistics: an introduction to language in the Justice System. Blackwell.
- Gibbons, J., V Prakasam, K V Tirumalesh, and H Nagarajan (Eds) (2004). Language in the Law. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
- Gibbons, J. and M. Teresa Turell (eds) (2008). Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Grant, T. (2008). "Quantifying evidence in forensic authorship analysis", Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 14(1).
- Grant, T. and Baker, K. (2001). 'Reliable, valid markers of authorship', Forensic Linguistics VIII(1): 66-79.
- Hollien, H. (2002). "Forensic Voice Identification". New York: Harcourt.
- Hoover, D. L. (2001). "Statistical stylistics and authorship attribution: an empirical investigation", Literary and Linguistic Comuputing, XIV (4), 421-44
- Koenig, B.J. (1986) 'Spectrographic voice identification: a forensic survey', letter to the editor of J. Acoustic Soc, Am., 79, 6, 2088-90.
- Maley, Y. (1994). 'The language of the law', in J. Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law, London:Longman,246-69
- McGehee, F. (1937).' The reliability of the identification of the human voice', Journal of General Psychology, 17, 249-71
- McMenamin, G. (1993). Forensic Stylistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
- Nolan, F. and Grabe, E. (1996) 'Preparing a voice lineup', Forensic Linguistics, 3 i, 74-94
- Pennycook, A. (1996) 'Borrowing others words: text, ownership, memory and plagiarism', TESOL Quarterly, 30, 201-30.
- Shuy, Roger W (2001). 'Discourse Analysis in the Legal Context.' In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. pp. 437–452.
External links
- ALIAS Technology LLC
- Forensic Linguistics at All About Forensic Science.com
- Cardiff University's MA (or Postgraduate Diploma/Certificate) in Forensic Linguistics
- Unabomber Case and Trial
- International Journal of Speech Language and the Law
- Forensic Linguistics Casebook - an independent wiki collecting cases where forensic linguistics has been used.
- Aston University's Centre for Forensic Linguistics
- Hofstra University's Forensic Linguistics Project
- International Association of Forensic Linguists
- International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics
- Tiersma, Peter,: Homepage of a forensic linguist from Loyola Law School
- Institute for Linguistic Evidence, a nonprofit research organization.
- Reading between the lines - BBC News article on the Centre for Forensic Linguistics
- Foulkes, Dr Paul, a forensic linguist at the University of York- Radio interview.
- Webcast of a lecture on forensic linguistics given by Roger W. Shuy at the University of Montana School of Law
- Webster’s forensic linguistic home page - links to a wide variety of forensic linguistic [resources
- Forensic Linguistics: Linguist as detective & expert witness - Public lecture by Prof. Malcolm Coulthard
- Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) Lingüística forense en el Máster de Estudios Filológicos Superiores