Forensic linguistics

What is forensic
linguistics?
Branch of applied linguistics

Linguistic knowledge, methods and

¿
insights

Law, language, crime investigation, trial

and judicial procedure
Areas of application:

• understanding language of the written

law;
• understanding language use in forensic
and judicial processes;
• the provision of linguistic evidence.
Emergency calls

• the recipient’s ability to extract

primarily linguistic information is
crucial;
• emphasis on intonation, voice pitch
and the extent to which there is
cooperation between the caller and the
recipient;
• full cooperation includes frank and
timely responses.
Suicide letter
• brief, concise and highly
propositional with a
degree of evasiveness.
• thematic, directed to the
addressee and relevant to
the relationship between
them.
• sentences allude to the
act of killing oneself, or
the method of suicide
that was undertaken.
• less than 300 words in
length.
Death row statements
• admit the crime or deny the crime;
• denounce witnesses as dishonest, critique law
enforcement as corrupt in an attempt to portray
innocence;
• The Forensic Linguistics Institute holds a corpus of these
documents and is conducting research on them.
Other cases
• legal disputes over trademark.
• questions of plagiarism.
• a forensic linguist can analyze language
samples from multiple authors and then
determine which author’s language matches the
disputed text the most.
• Two popular pieces of literature where this
technique has been used are J.K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter and Dan Brown’s The Da
Vinci Code.