Arizona State University



Forensic Linguistics – Elly van Gelderen – 3 November 20162-4 pm, Poly campus1.What is Forensic Linguistics?The International Association of Forensic Linguistics sees Forensic linguistics as involved with the following (copied from their website but with letters added).“a. Study of the language of the law, including the language of legal documents and of the courts, the police, and prisons;b. The use of linguistic evidence (phonological, morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic) in the analysis of authorship and plagiarism, speaker identification and voice comparison, confessions, linguistic profiling, suicide notes, consumer product warnings;c. The use of language as evidence in civil cases (trademark, contract disputes, defamation, product liability, deceptive trade practices, copyright infringement);d. The alleviation of language-based inequality and disadvantage in the legal system;e. The interchange of ideas and information between the legal and linguistic communities;f. Research into the practice, improvement, and ethics of expert testimony and the presentation of linguistic evidence, as well as legal interpreting and translation;g. Better public understanding of the interaction between language and the law”. Some topics1.Power and the legal system, situational characteristics; analysis of questions and answers; types of witnesses; inherent disadvantages; (Miranda) rights and language. Plain language movement.2.An author’s fingerprint: through genre, register, and time. 3.Plagiarism and collusion: how much variation/similarity can be expected? Limits to memory.4.Characteristics of suicide notes, ransom notes, emergency calls, witness statements, wills, and confessions. Ramsey case.6.Cybercrime, text-messages, and e-mail. Corpora and the internet. Look at orthography, polymorphs, ... Zuckerberg case!7.Linguistic Profile: language that provides evidence for age, religion, region, L1, etc of unknown author. The Unabomber.8.Trademark issues. The Redskins.Register-Why is this important to FL?-What is the difference between register, genre, and style; markers and features (see Biber et al 2009)? -Spoken texts are said to have more first person pronouns (and other pronouns), fewer nouns and adjectives modifying them, more active verbs, and generally more verbs, and fillers. Table 1 provides an example of the slight differences in the ratio of ‘the’ between spoken and written registers in American English and Table 2 in British English. More definite articles are expected in written because it has more nouns too.Table 1:The definite article in COCATable 2: The definite article in the BNCQUESTION/ACTIVITYUse COCA and COHA and look at the decline of `whom’ or changes with `start’ and ‘begin’.Methods1.Percentage of top 10/20 function words (MonoConc or AntConc) 30 high frequency lexical words (MonoConc or AntConc)3.Unique or rare words, hapax legomena, latinate etc (MonoConc or AntConc)4.Type-token ratio (AntConc)5.Lexical density ()6.Gunning Fog Index ()7.Sentence length () or by hand.8.Word length ()9.Verb or Noun prevalence = Register10.Orthography: mistakes and errors (esp. McMenamin)11.Grammar and discourse12.Shared sequences of words and shared lexical wordsQUESTION/ACTIVITYFind a text, put it in a .txt file, and use it in textalyser!Software to measure textual differences1.How to convert pdf files: but be sure to check the result! 2.AntConc is a free concordancer. It will search texts and give frequency lists. . 3.Fog-index () measures 3+ etc. Lexical density: unique words divided by total words. Other programs for sentence/word length and lexical density: and are corpora that give you data and information on registers and archaisms: BNC, COHA, COCA and OED. Word frequency for the top 5000 words is free but you have to register: complexity 3 for guidance.1.Sentence length is one aspect. So measure that.2.How complex are the sentences? Coordinated or Subordinated?Are the subordinated clauses relative clauses (modifying a noun) or do they function as subjects, object, adverbials in another clause?What kind of relative clauses are used: restrictive or non-restrictive?3.Verb types:lexical: transitive, intransitive, copula, ...? finite or not?auxiliaries: which kinds?passives?4.Are there many PPs; how do they function (modify N or V)?5.Special word order:Where are the adverbials?Is there extraposition?Are there cleft sentences and topicalizations?6How complex are the NPs? Many adjectives, predeterminers, etc?7.Are there fragments, Oxford commas, sentence-initial coorinations? Table 3: Syntactic characteristics6.Statistical tests can be done online, e.g. chi-square. If you have 215 instances of first person pronouns without ‘self’ following them and 6 with `self’ and 959 third person pronouns without `self’ and 158 with, is this a statistically significant difference between first and third person? Some info on this test: for fun: Gutenberg ProjectQUESTION/ACTIVITYDownload a text and put it in AntConc. Find the percentage of the most frequent words.Some casesHigh Frequency LexiconSome authors are very consistent in their use of HFL, as the following quote from O&L shows.I made a table for two recent papers that I (mainly) wrote. I was amazed to see only one word (marker) in common in the top 20 lexical words. Looking at the top 30 HFL, there was an overlap of three (marker, verb, changes). My comment would be that I would have to look at the 30-50 HFL range. My top 20 list shows the topic of the paper more than the author’s choice.Paper 11CP11yes2features12use3complementizer13like4adverb14marker (13x)5OED15section6degree16head7manner17position8interrogative18meaning9English19used10Specifier20clausePaper 21French11 cycle2object12 third3agreement13see4subject14marker (18x)5pronouns15data6person16markers7pronoun17changes8preverbal18languages9corpus19stage10verb20changeTable 4:Most frequent lexical words in two papersFunction/grammatical wordsThe results are amazing:novelyearraw #percentageSense & S181142363.47Pride & P181343783.47Mansf Park181463453.91Emma181551303.22Persuasion1818 (posth)33153.98North Abbey1818 (posth)33214.15Total22.2/6= 3.7 (unlike the 3.6 on p. 45)Table 5:The use of ‘the’ in 6 Austen novelsQUESTION/ACTIVITYHow would you go about trying to argue that the author of the below extract from The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling?Polymorphs The below table shows features of a questioned text with those of known authors. How would you go about solving who wrote the questioned texts?Table 6:PolymorphsQUESTIONRead some of the background on the Ceglia vs Zuckerberg case, e.g. from . The full declaration by G. McMenamin is available here: . This case became a hot issue among forensic linguistics. Do you agree with McMenamin’s methods or not; provide reasons for your views.Other applicationsAI have taken the below description and suicide note from . Evaluate the purpose of this note by deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Do you think it meets the criteria for `suicide’ note? Why/why not?“A note … was found torn into 27 pieces in Foster's briefcase after his death. The note is clearly shown to be missing a piece, therefore it was 27 of 28 pieces. The note was not initially found upon the original search of the briefcase in which it was cleared of its effects. It was found on July 26, 1993 and held by the White House for some 30 hours before it was turned over to USPP investigators. The full text of Foster's note was as follows”:I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overworkI did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conductNo one in The White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including?any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific groupThe?FBI?lied in their report to the?AGThe press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staffThe?GOP?has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigationThe?Ushers Office?plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRCThe public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staffThe?WSJ?editors lie without consequenceI was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.BHow would you rewrite the below jury instructions? Just give some suggestions; don’t actually rewrite it.References:Register, Genre, and Style by Doug Biber & Susan Conrad. 2009. CUP.The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics, edited by Malcolm Coulthard & Alison Johnson 2010. Routledge.An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics:Language in Evidence by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson 2007. Routledge.Wordcrime by John Olsson. 2009. Continuum.The Language of Murder Cases by Roger Shuy. 2014. OUP.Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English by Hans Lindquist. 2010. Edinburgh UP. ................
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