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Criminal linguistics2/12/2024 These features are usually related to grammatical structure and are deeply embedded in each person’s individual authorial style. It relies on correctly grouping together texts produced by the same author, by isolating textual features specific to that author. This task, carried out by forensic linguists, is known as “ authorship attribution”. This has hugely shifted the defamation landscape. Social media use has skyrocketed in the past decade, boosting the trend of ‘viral’ content. These online offences are made easy by the anonymity and reach allowed on social media platforms.Ĭorrectly identifying individuals who post threatening, defamatory or false messages online is of chief importance for investigators as it can help protect those targeted. The verbose wild west of the webĪnother example where linguistics intersects with criminals is found in the rapid increase in crimes involving digital communication. Such casual conversations are not a suitable test for language fluency. In the past, these defendants or witnesses have been treated as though they understood complex legal English simply because they could chat about the weather, or their family. People who speak English as an additional language sometimes don’t know their legal rights in situations such as police interviews. Gibson’s lawyer Michael Lundberg (pictured) told the ABC the payment wasn’t as large as he’d hoped. In 2018, Gene Gibson was awarded a total A$1.5 million in compensation by the West Australian government, after being jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. This neglect resulted in Gibson spending nearly five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Police interviewed Gibson without an interpreter, assuming one wasn’t needed to assess his English fluency. In 2018, the Western Australia Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of manslaughter for Gene Gibson, an Aboriginal man with a cognitive impairment for whom English was a third language. Widespread ignorance on the vitality of forensic linguistics has led to some of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in Australian history. These non-technical interpretations are easy to conflate with the academic discipline of linguistics.īut apart from causing linguists a headache at dinner parties, does it really matter if people misunderstand what linguists do? Some people think this refers to a person who speaks many different languages, or is particularly fluent in their speech or writing. It comes down to how we use the word “linguist”. Ironically, a big problem for forensic linguists (and linguistics in general) relates to language. Shutterstock A widely misunderstood field Sociolinguistics is a branch of language study focused on the relationship between language and various groups in society. Yet the work done by forensic linguists seems to largely elude members of the public. Since the first known forensic linguistic case in 1953, all of the above abilities have proven invaluable in courts time and time again. This is because the variety of English they’re familiar with would differ, in small but notable ways, from native English speakers. For example, we can identify when someone from a non-English language background might misunderstand a question. Sociolinguistics, which looks at how language use varies across different social groups. We can recognise subtle differences in the sound of a vowel when produced by different speakers, or by speakers of different dialects and languages. Phonetics and phonology, which refer to the sounds of language. Semantics, which explores how speakers and listeners form meaning, such as when making sense of a written text Grammatical structures, wherein changes in punctuation patterns between texts can signal different authors Thus, linguists are uniquely placed to provide expert opinions on how language is used. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Reading between the lines (and everything else)
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