The significance of linguistic expertise in the judicial system

Gőcze Borbála

The significance of linguistic expertise in the judicial system

Linguistic expertise is needed at every stage of the legal process. Generally, forensic linguistics deals with language related issues in the judicial system, including the language of legal texts and legal processes. Forensic linguistics is a field within applied linguistics and it studies written and spoken texts to decide whether the evidence is convincing or not. According to Olsson (2008), forensic linguists use syntax, phonetics, morphology, discourse analysis, and semantics to investigate the texts. Nolan (1991) claims that although forensic linguistics mainly has a role in the investigation stage, forensic phonetics plays an important role in the trial stage as well. Judges, lawyers, and the members of the jury do not possess the skills of a trained linguist, and their lack of competence in these particular areas could easily change the outcome of a trial. It should be an established custom at court to employ a forensic linguist in order to insure a fair trial at all circumstances.

Forensic linguists deal with numerous types of texts, for example suicide notes and threat texts. Their first and foremost task is authorship analysis. Authorship analysis consists of the fields author characterisation and similarity detection.  The given text is considered as a sample, and it is compared to other texts written by the assumed author. Coulthard (2004) claims that “every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language they speak and write, their own idiolect” (431) and he also introduces the term “linguistic fingerprint” (Couldhard, 2004). This leads to the conclusion that every speaker of the language has a distinctive style and a typical vocabulary, and by examining other samples by the  person who supposedly wrote that given piece of text, a trained forensic linguist can decide whether it was written by that author or not. The concept of the linguistic fingerprint can be considered misleading, since it suggests that each and every person has a very unique and unmistakable style, and this data is stored in the same way as physical fingerprints. Authorship analysis always focuses on a particular text and forensic linguists do not use the method of retrieving data from previous cases like the police (Olsson, 2008). Clearly, lawyers and judges do not have either the expertise in forensic stylistics or the time to deal with the analysis of texts, and in certain cases it is important to be able to decide whether it was a suicide or a murder.

The methods and goals of forensic phoneticians are rather similar to authorship analysts’. The task of a forensic phonetician is to decide whether the text, for example an emergency call or a threat call, is original and to carefully analyse utterances in order to avoid misinterpretations. A trained forensic phonetician can determine the dialect that she hears on a recoding and she can decide whether the dialect matches the suspect’s.  Tiersma calls this area of study forensic dialectology and it is not the same as voice identification which will be briefly discussed in this essay later on. Forensic dialectology merely focuses on accents and dialects in order to give a satisfying answer to the question whether it is the suspect who speaks on the recording. The identification of the speaker can be important in the case of threat calls or hoax emergency calls. It is important to note that forensic phoneticians are not psychics: they are unable tell who speaks on the tape, they can only tell whether it is the suspect’s dialect or not (Coulthard & Johnson, 2010). Language analysis is similar to dialectology; dialectology studies the differences between the regional variations of the same language and language analysis has the task of determining the speaker’s native language. Similarly to authorship analysts, forensic phoneticians also do not have a data bank to recall samples from; they always work with the samples provided to them (Tiersma).

The expertise of trained linguists in legal processes is undoubtedly significant. Forensic linguists often have to testify in court on problems such as the exact meaning of phrases, textual ambiguity, the importance of certain patterns in language, and the accuracy of a tape transcript (Olsson, 2008). All these matters can be and in numerous countries are dealt with by the lawyers and solicitors participating in the given case, but since their training does not focus on linguistics, they are not qualified to base their evidences on textual matters. This is why consulting a trained linguist in cases where textual evidence is concerned should be an established custom at court.

References

Coulthard, M. (2004). Author Identification, Idiolect and Linguistic Uniqueness. American Speech, 25. 431-447.

Coulthard, M., & Johnson, A. (Eds). (2010). The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics. New York: Routledge.

Nolan, F. (1991). Forensic Phonetics. Journal of Linguistics, 27. 483-493.

Olsson, J. (2008). Forensic Linguistics. New York: Continuum Publishing Group.

Tiersma, P. What is Forensic Linguistics? Retrieved from http://www.languageandlaw.org/FORENSIC.HTM. Last accessed: 2014. 05. 11.