Forensic Linguistics: the application of language description in legal contexts

Malcolm Coulthard ^[1]
1. [1] Aston University
  
  Aston University
  
  Reino Unido
Localización: Langage et société, ISSN 0181-4095, ISSN-e 2101-0382, Nº. 132, 2010 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Linguistique légale et demande sociale : les linguistes au tribunal), págs. 15-33
Idioma: inglés
Títulos paralelos:
- La linguistique légale: applications de la description linguistique dans le domaine du droit
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Resumen
- In this article I first divide Forensic Linguistics into three sub-disciplines : the language of written legal texts, the spoken language of legal proceedings, and the linguist as expert witness and then go on to give a small number of examples of the research undertaken in these three areas. For the language of written legal texts, I present work on the (in) comprehensibility of police cautions and of judges’ instructions to juries. For the spoken language of legal proceedings, I report work on the problems of interpreted interaction, of vulnerable witnesses and the need for more detailed research comparing the interactive rules in adversarial and investigative systems. Finally, to illustrate the role of the linguist as expert witness I report a trademark case, five different authorship attribution cases, three very different plagiarism cases and I end reporting briefly the contribution of linguists to language assessment techniques used in the linguistic classification of asylum seekers.