The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics offers a comprehensive survey of the subdiscipline of Forensic Linguistics, with this new edition providing both updated overviews from leading figures in the field and exciting new contributions from the next generation of forensic linguists.
The Handbook is a unique work of reference to the leading ideas, debates, topics, approaches and methodologies in forensic linguistics and language and the law. It comprises 43 chapters, including entirely new contributions from many international experts, in the areas of Aboriginal claimants, appraisal and stance, author identities online, biased language in capital trials, corpus approaches, false confessions, forensic phonetics, forensic transcription, the historical courtroom, legal interpretation, multilingual law, police crisis negotiation, speaker profiling, and trolling. The chapters include a wealth of examples and case studies so the reader can see forensic linguistics applied and in action.
Edited and authored by the world’s leading academics and practitioners, The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics is a vital resource for advanced students, researchers and scholars, and will also be of interest to legal, law enforcement and security professionals.
Contents
1 Introduction by Alison May, Rui Sousa-Silva and Malcolm Coulthard
Section I The language of the law and the legal process
1.1 Legal language and legal meaning
2 Legal talk: Socio-pragmatic aspects of legal questioning: police interviews, prosecutorial discourse and trial discourse by Alison May, Elizabeth Holt, Neveen Al Saeed and Nurshafawati Ahmad Sani
3 Legal writing: complexity by Gail Stygall
4 Legal writing: attitude and emphasis by Edward Finegan and Benjamin T. Lee
5 Creating multilingual law: Language and translation at the Court of Justice of the European Union by Karen McAuliffe
6 Legal interpretation: The category of ordinary meaning and its role in legal interpretation by Christopher Hutton
1.2 Witnesses and suspects in interviews and investigations
7 Miranda rights by Janet Ainsworth
8 Witnesses and suspects in interviews by Frances Rock
9 False confessors: The language of false confession in police interrogation by Philip Gaines and Belén Lowrey-Kinberg
10 Police interviews in the judicial process: Police interviews as evidence by Kate Haworth
11 Assuming identities online: Authorship synthesis in undercover investigations by Nicci MacLeod
1.3 Language in the courtroom
12 Order in court: Talk-in-interaction in the judicial process by Paul Drew and Fabio Ferraz de Almeida
13 Narrative in the trial: Constructing crime stories in court by Chris Heffer
14 Advances in studies of the historical courtroom: (Con)Textual, ideational and interpersonal dimensions by Krisda Chaemsaithong
15 Capitally speaking: language and bias in capital trials by Mel Greenlee
16 Multimodality in legal interaction: Beyond written and verbal modalities by Gregory M. Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert
1.4 Lay participants in the judicial process
17 Instructions to jurors: Redrafting California’s jury instructions by Peter M. Tiersma
18 Vulnerable witnesses: Vulnerable witnesses in police investigative interviews in England and Wales by Michelle Aldridge-Waddon
19 Rape victims: The discourse of rape trials by Susan Ehrlich
20 Defendants’ allocutions at sentencing: Courtroom apologies by M. Catherine Gruber
21 Aboriginal claimants: Adjusting legal procedures to accommodate linguistic and cultural issues in hearings in Aboriginal land rights claims in the Northern Territory of Australia by Peter R. A. Gray
Section II The linguist as expert in the legal process
2.1 Expert and process
22 The forensic linguist: The expert linguist meets the adversarial system by Lawrence M. Solan
23 Trademark linguistics: Trademarks: language that one owns by Ronald R. Butters
24 Speaker profiling and forensic voice comparison: The auditory-acoustic approach by Michael Jessen
25 Forensic phonetics and automatic speaker recognition: The complementarity of human- and machine-based forensic speaker comparison by Dominic Watt and Georgina Brown
26 Forensic transcription: The case for transcription as a dedicated branch of linguistic science by Helen Fraser
27 Consumer product warnings: Composition, identification and assessment of adequacy by Bethany K. Dumas
28 Terrorism and forensic linguistics: Linguistics in terrorism cases by Roger W. Shuy
2.2 Multilingualism in legal contexts
29 Non-native speakers in detention: Assessing the English language proficiency of non-native speakers in detention: an expert witness account by Fiona English
30 Court interpreting: The need to raise the bar: court interpreters as specialized experts by Sandra Hale
31 Interpreting outside the courtroom: ‘A shattered mirror?’ Interpreting in law enforcement contexts outside the courtroom by Krzysztof Kredens, Eloísa Monteoliva-García and Ruth Morris
2.3 Authorship and opinion
32 Experts and opinions: In my opinion by Malcolm Coulthard
33 Forensic stylistics: The theory and practice of forensic stylistics by Gerald R. McMenamin
34 Text messaging forensics: Txt 4n6: idiolect free authorship analysis? by Tim Grant
35 Plagiarism: Evidence-based detection and analysis in forensic contexts by Rui Sousa-Silva
36 Computational forensic linguistics: Computer-assisted document comparison by David Woolls
Section III New directions
37 Corpus approaches to forensic linguistics: Applying corpus data and techniques in forensic contexts by David Wright
38 Corpora and legal interpretation: Corpus approaches to ordinary meaning in legal interpretation by Stefan Th. Gries
39 Police crisis negotiation: An assessment of existing models by Dawn Archer and Matt Todd
40 Investigative linguistics by Jack Grieve and Helena Woodfield
41 ‘Prison has been a proper punishment’: Investigating stance in forensic and legal contexts by Tammy Gales
42 Pranksters, provocateurs, propagandists: Using forensic corpus linguistics to identify and understand trolling by Claire Hardaker
43 Concluding remarks: Future directions by Malcolm Coulthard, Alison May and Rui Sousa-Silva
Editors’ Biographies
Malcolm Coulthard is Emeritus Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, UK. He was Foundation President of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and founding co-editor of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law (IJSLL) and is co-editor of the international journal Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito.
Alison May (formerly Johnson) is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Leeds, UK. She is co-author of An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence, 2nd edn. (with Malcolm Coulthard and David Wright, Routledge, 2017) and co-editor of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.
Rui Sousa-Silva is Assistant Professor and researcher of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Portugal. He is Publicity Officer of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and co-editor of the international journal Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito.