TEXT TYPES IN FORENSICS

1. NAME: KARISHMA IQBAL
CLASS NO : 03
SUBJECT : FORENSIC
LINGISTICS
SUBMITTED TO: MAÁM
FARKHANDA
TOPIC:HISTORY AND TEXT
TYPES OF FORENSIC
LINGUISTICS

2. FORENSIC LINGUISTICS
 The word ‘’forensic’’ is derived from the Latin word
‘’forensis’’ which means ‘’forum’’ where the law
court of ancient Rome were held.
 Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics,
or language and the law, is the application
of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to
the forensic context of law, language, crime
investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a
branch of applied linguistics.

3.  There are principally three areas of application for
linguists working in forensic contexts:
 Legal Language: - understanding language of the
written law.
 Language of Legal Process: - understanding
language use in forensic and judicial processes.
 Language as Evidence: - the provision of linguistic
evidence.
 The discipline of forensic linguistics is not
homogeneous; it involves a range of experts and
researchers in different areas of the field.

4. History of Forensic Linguistics
 Even though the term forensic linguistics is a fairly
recent development, interest in how language has been
used in legal and forensic contexts can be traced back
to ancient Greece and Rome (Coulthard et al. 2011).
 The Christian Bible has been a focus of linguistic
disputes concerning the authorship of all the New
Testament letters of St Paul and the Book of Hebrews.
Even Shakespeare has come under suspicion with the
assertion that Bacon and Marlowe may have
contributed to, or completely written a number of his
plays.

5.  In 1968, a Swedish linguist named Jan Svartvik
published The Evans Statements: A Case for Forensic
Linguistics, wherein he showed that the four statements
made by Timothy Evans to the police, regarding the
murders of his wife and daughters, “had a grammatical
style measurably different from that of uncontested
parts of a statement and thus a new area of forensic
expertise was born” (Coulthard and Johnson 2007, 5).
 Timothy Evans was posthumously pardoned 16 years
after being executed for murder in 1950 (Coulthard etal.
2011).

6.  A similar case of disputed confession is the Derek Bentley case.
Derek Bentley was an illiterate man with a low IQ, who together
with another man was involved in an armed robbery where a
policeman was shot and killed. Despite conflicting ballistic
evidence and procedural inconsistencies, Bentley was sentenced
to death and he was hanged in 1953. Part of the evidence used
against him was his confession statement, which had allegedly
been transcribed verbatim. Upon reopening the case, however, it
was found, for example, that the frequency and usage of the
word then in the police transcripts showed evidence of ‘police
language’ embedded in the confession, which therefore meant
that they were not verbatim transcripts. Bentley was
posthumously pardoned in 1998, 46 years after the guilty verdict
(Coulthard 2000).

7.  Moving to the US and the beginning of the
field really began with the 1963 case of
Ernesto Miranda.
 His case lead to the creation of Miranda
Rights and pushed the focus of forensic
linguistics on witness questioning rather than
police statements.

8.  Between 1978 and 1995 Theodore Kaczynski, commonly known
as the Unabomber, conducted numerous bombing attacks on
universities and airlines. He said he would only cease his
bombing campaign if his 35 000 word anti-industrialist manifesto
was published in major newspapers. When FBI agents searched
Kaczynski’s home, they found hundreds of documents authored
by Kaczynski which had never been published. When the
documents were analyzed alongside the manifesto, it was found
that there were a number of linguistic features and expressions
which appeared in both documents, and despite some features
being more distinctive than others, the prosecution put forward
the argument that: “the more common words and phrases being
used by Kaczynski became distinctive when used in combination
with each other” (Coulthard 2000).

9. Forensic Text Types
 Emergency call:
 It involves the analysis of the voice of the
speaker and emphasis on intonation, voice, pitch, and the extent
to which there is cooperation between the caller and the recipient
at any one time is also very important in analyzing an emergency
call.
 If the caller uses a rising pitch at the end of every turn, it might
represent a lack of commitment; the recipient’s use of a rising
pitch indicates doubt or desire for clarification.
 The recipient’s ability to extract primary linguistic information in
threatening situation and to come up with the required response
in a timely manner is crucial to the successful completion of the
call.

10.  Ransom Demands:
 Threat is a counterpart of a promise and is
an important feature in a ransom demand. Ransom demands are
also examined to identify between genuine and false threats. A n
example of a ransom note analysis can be seen in the case of
the Lindbergh kidnapping, where the first ransom note
(sometimes referred to as the Nursery Note) stated: "We warn
you for making anything public or for notify the Polise the child is
in gut care" (sic).
 From the sentence, the kidnapper makes the claim that the child
is in good hands but to make such a claim, the note would have
to be written before the perpetrator enters the premises.
Therefore, the claim is false (at the time of writing) since the
kidnapper had not even encountered the child when he wrote the
note.

11.  Ransom demands in the style of written notes
have been present in m any notable cases. The
style of writing used in ransom notes are
examined by forensic linguists in order to
determine the writing's true intent, as well as
determining who wrote the note.
 Forensic linguists look at factors such as syntactic
structures, stylistic patterns, punctuation and even
spelling while analyzing ransom notes.

12.  Suicide letters:
 A suicide note is typically brief,
concise and highly propositional with a degree of
evasiveness. A credible suicide letter must be making a
definite unequivocal proposition in a situational context.
The proposition of genuine suicide is thematic, directed
to the addressee (or addressees) and relevant to the
relationship between them. Suicide notes Stefan Zweig
Suicide Letter generally have sentences alluding to the
act of killing oneself, or the method of suicide that was
undertaken.

13.  The contents of a suicide note could be
intended to make the addressee suffer or feel
guilt. Genuine suicide letters are short,
typically less than 300 w words in length.
Extraneous or irrelevant material is often
excluded from the text.

14.  Death row statements:
 Death row
statements either admit the crime or leaving
the witness with an impression of honesty and
forthrightness; or deny the crime, leaving the
witness with an impression of innocence. The
Forensic Linguistics Institute holds a corpus of
these documents and is conducting research
on them.

15. Thank you for Listening