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Forensic Linguistics

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Linguistics as a forensic science
Athanasios Filippaios Chatzoudas
Law plays a central role in our everyday lives; more importantly it defines and shapes the boundaries of freedom, dictates restrictions and is connected to almost everything people do or avoid doing. What is interestingly noted by Gibbons (2004) is that law can only be approached in linguistic terms. Therefore language becomes somehow the only way to examine law, a fundamental infrastructure work of human manners .
Forensic Linguistics consists of the study of language governing law and occasions where linguists become expert witnesses, process evidence and testify it before the law. In this paper we will mostly focus on the first branch mentioned, and that is because of its …show more content…

What seems special in their occasion is that even though their semantic competence is sound, they lack pragmatic capacity and are unaware of legal concepts. Eades (1994) studied their ways of communicating and came up with multiple understandings. First of all it is pointed out that Aboriginals are in great proportions left out of Australian education. In addition, their way of communicating is based on completely different socio-cultural grounds. For example, when information is required, it is normal not to use questions and it is normal practice to avoid eye contact. They also do not use quantifications and tend to be ‘vague’ and ‘non-specific’ (Eades, 1994). Eades also pointed out the fact that their competence in Standard English is satisfactory makes things worse for them as officials fail to recognize elements of Aboriginal culture to them and mistakenly think that Standard English is their mother tongue. If we take all these factors under consideration we can safely assume that the Australian justice system cannot be applied to their cases.
We will now shed light on the different situations where forensic linguistics is used on all types of lingual court evidence, whether to determine if a certain person has produced alleged evidence (Gibbons, 1994), or to provide evidence for legal purposes. In this part, the focus lies on oral discourse analysis, detecting the author of a …show more content…

These are idiolectal and sociolectal features, accent and voice pitch. However Nolan (1994) argues that the human ear is unable on many occasions to effectively detect who the speaker in an audio excerpt is. In that way he proposes that auditory analysis should be complemented with acoustic analysis, which is conducted by special equipment. Nonetheless, both authors incline to the view that speaker recognition techniques were still advancing at the time being, and when acoustic analysis is not available, the outcome is covered by

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