2nd Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics
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.
List of illustrations
List of conventions used
List of contributors and affiliations
Notes on editors and contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
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
Alison May, Elizabeth Holt, Neveen Al Saeed and Nurshafawati Ahmad Sani
3 Legal writing: complexity
Complex documents / average and not-so-average readers
Gail Stygall
4 Legal writing: attitude and emphasis
Corpus linguistic approaches to ‘legal language’: adverbial expression of attitude and emphasis in supreme court opinions
Edward Finegan and Benjamin T. Lee
5 Creating multilingual law
Language and translation at the Court of Justice of the European Union
Karen McAuliffe
6 Legal interpretation
The category of ordinary meaning and its role in legal interpretation
Christopher Hutton
1.2 Witnesses and suspects in interviews and investigations
7 Miranda rights
Curtailing coercion in police interrogation: the failed promise of Miranda v. Arizona
Janet Ainsworth
8 Witnesses and suspects in interviews
Collecting oral evidence: the police, the public and the written word
Frances Rock
9 False confessors
The language of false confession in police interrogation
Philip Gaines and Belén Lowrey-Kinberg
10 Police interviews in the judicial process
Police interviews as evidence
Kate Haworth
11 Assuming identities online
Authorship synthesis in undercover investigations
Nicci MacLeod
1.3 Language in the courtroom
12 Order in court
Talk-in-interaction in the judicial process
Paul Drew and Fabio Ferraz de Almeida
13 Narrative in the trial
Constructing crime stories in court
Chris Heffer
14 Advances in studies of the historical courtroom
(Con)Textual, ideational and interpersonal dimensions
Krisda Chaemsaithong
15 Capitally speaking
Language and bias in capital trials
Mel Greenlee
16 Multimodality in legal interaction
Beyond written and verbal modalities
Gregory M. Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert
1.4 Lay participants in the judicial process
17 Instructions to jurors
Redrafting California’s jury instructions
Peter M. Tiersma
18 Vulnerable witnesses
Vulnerable witnesses in police investigative interviews in England and Wales
Michelle Aldridge-Waddon
19 Rape victims
The discourse of rape trials
Susan Ehrlich
20 Defendants’ allocutions at sentencing
Courtroom apologies
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
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
Lawrence M. Solan
23 Trademark linguistics
Trademarks: language that one owns
Ronald R. Butters
24 Speaker profiling and forensic voice comparison
The auditory-acoustic approach
Michael Jessen
25 Forensic phonetics and automatic speaker recognition
The complementarity of human- and machine-based forensic speaker comparison
Dominic Watt and Georgina Brown
26 Forensic transcription
The case for transcription as a dedicated branch of linguistic science
Helen Fraser
27 Consumer product warnings
Composition, identification and assessment of adequacy
Bethany K. Dumas
28 Terrorism and forensic linguistics
Linguistics in terrorism cases
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
Fiona English
30 Court interpreting
The need to raise the bar: court interpreters as specialized experts
Sandra Hale
31 Interpreting outside the courtroom
‘A shattered mirror?’ Interpreting in law enforcement contexts outside the courtroom
Krzysztof Kredens, Eloísa Monteoliva-García and Ruth Morris
2.3 Authorship and opinion
32 Experts and opinions
In my opinion
Malcolm Coulthard
33 Forensic stylistics
The theory and practice of forensic stylistics
Gerald R. McMenamin
34 Text messaging forensics
Txt 4n6: idiolect free authorship analysis?
Tim Grant
35 Plagiarism
Evidence-based detection and analysis in forensic contexts
Rui Sousa-Silva
36 Computational forensic linguistics
Computer-assisted document comparison
David Woolls
Section III New directions
37 Corpus approaches to forensic linguistics
Applying corpus data and techniques in forensic contexts
David Wright
38 Corpora and legal interpretation
Corpus approaches to ordinary meaning in legal interpretation
Stefan Th. Gries
39 Police crisis negotiation
An assessment of existing models
Dawn Archer and Matt Todd
40 Investigative linguistics
Jack Grieve and Helena Woodfield
41 'Prison has been a proper punishment'
Investigating stance in forensic and legal contexts
Tammy Gales
42 Pranksters, provocateurs, propagandists
Using forensic corpus linguistics to identify and understand trolling
Claire Hardaker
43 Concluding remarks
Future directions
Malcolm Coulthard, Alison May and Rui Sousa-Silva
Index
Biography
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.
'An exciting new edition of the original ground-breaking forensic linguistics handbook, featuring more than 20 new authors, joining almost 30 of the original authors. The new and updated chapters bring additional depth and breadth, and greater global diversity to this valuable resource. A must-read for scholars, researchers and practitioners in the rapidly developing field of language and the law.'
Diana Eades, University of New England, Australia
From reviews of the first edition:
'... the editors have done a masterful job in providing the needed broad coverage in forensic linguistics, and helped the reader to draw connections and to cross-reference between the variety of papers presented.' - Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
