Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework - Группа авторов

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hispánica from El Colegio de México, México, DF. He is the author of several books and articles, including Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics (2002) and Introducción a la lingüística forense: un libro de curso (2017) and papers on language acquisition, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. He presently works as a consultant and expert witness in forensic linguistics.

      I. M. Nick holds a PhD in English linguistics (University of Freiburg, Germany), an MA in German linguistics (University of Washington, Seattle), a BA in German language and literature (University of Maryland), a BSc in clinical and social psychology (University of Maryland), and an MSc in forensic and investigative psychology (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom). In summer 2010, she was awarded the German postdoctoral degree, the “Habilitation,” for her research in English linguistics. Within forensic linguistics, her area of specialization is suicide letter analysis. She is a member of the Public Health Committee for the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) and President of the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics.

      Sheila Queralt Estevez is founder and director of Laboratorio SQ-Lingüistas Forenses. Since 2010, she has undertaken more than 100 consultations in forensic linguistics related to the forensic comparison of written texts and discourse analysis in Spain and abroad (Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, United States, South Africa) alongside different police forces. In 2019, she was appointed mentor of the First National League of Challenges in Cyberspace organized by the Guardia Civil (Spanish law enforcement agency). She is the author of the Decalogue for Requesting a Linguistics Expert Report and Atrapados por la lengua and co-author of Soy lingüista, lingüista forense and Fundamentos de la lingüística forense.

       Isabel Picornell and Ria Perkins

      INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXTS

      Forensic linguistics has come a long way since the term was first used in Jan Svartvik’s publication The Evans Statement: A Case for Forensic Linguistics in 1968. Since then, an increasing body of research has contributed to the growth and professionalism of this multi- and cross-disciplinary field, with practitioners regularly undertaking forensic linguistic casework.

      Forensic linguistics, broadly speaking, is the science of language analysis in a legal context and grounded in established linguistic theory, with practitioners applying linguistic knowledge and methodology to answering questions raised about the status, meaning, and authorship of the communication. Forensic linguistics can be seen as an area of applied linguistics in which techniques of linguistic analysis are applied to forensic situations and data. Linguistics involves the analysis of written texts or spoken interaction by describing and explaining the nature of the communication on a number of linguistic levels using a variety of interpretative tools, theories, and methods. Forensic linguistics essentially takes the linguist’s toolbox and applies it in forensic contexts, where text and speech samples are often unhelpfully short and few in number, in contrast to the large data collections traditionally used in academic research.

      PURPOSE AND ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

      Focusing on written (including electronic) communication, across a wide range of contexts, all chapters are authored by accomplished practitioners with consulting experience in their particular field. They discuss actual casework that they have undertaken, demonstrating their methodological choices and how they performed their analysis. The authors discuss and answer linguistic questions on issues as diverse as authorial ownership, communication in faked contexts, and how meaning is understood in today’s multisocial, multilingual society.

      As discussed in more detail later in this chapter, this book sets out current “good practice” within the field of forensic linguistic casework. The choice of good practice rather than best practice is a conscious one to reflect the evolving nature of forensic linguistics, which is still a comparatively new field. Technological advances mean that the methodology, the data analyzed, and the contexts in which forensic linguists work are all constantly evolving. The book does not endorse any particular practitioners or promote any methodologies. Rather, it presents practices that demonstrate a high level of rigor and theoretical basis, that work well in the context in which they are applied, that have the potential for replication through their grounding in solid processes and methodologies, that are empirically supported by linguistic theory and research, and that are presented with consideration for their weaknesses and limitations.

      The book is divided into two sections according to casework types: Section 1 deals with disputed and anonymous authorship analysis, while Section 2 addresses issues of meaning and interpretation.

      Section 1: Anonymous and Disputed Authorship Analysis

      This section’s five chapters present different forensic linguistic approaches to dealing with challenges posed by questioned authorship. Tim Grant and Jack Grieve open this section in Chapter 2 with an authorship verification analysis for a police investigation. The chapter raises issues associated with cognitive biases and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of stylistic and stylometric approaches in this closed-set authorship verification problem. In contrast, in Chapter 3 Lisa Donlan and Andrea Nini face an authorship issue that they address by using authorship profiling in a Cyprus-based court case. Here, the emphasis is not on comparing texts but on building a socio-demographic profile of its author to determine whether that profile matches that of its stated author.