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The international workshop on The use of linguistic
evidence for forensic purposes: concepts, methods and
applications has been set up to attain a two-fold
aim: a) to contribute to the discussion of forensic
linguistic matters at an international level, by bringing
together some of the most world-known forensic linguists
with a long practice around the world, and b) in so
doing, to help to launch forensic linguistics in Spain,
where some professional people have acted as experts,
but their practice has been very isolated. Also, the
launching of forensic linguistics has to be viewed in
the context of the stronger links to be established
between academics and society.
As the Forensic
Linguistics web page states:
"(.) Forensic Linguistics can be defined as the interface
between language and the law. This discipline includes
the study of a number of areas, which have to do with
the use of linguistic evidence within diverse public
contexts and professional settings such as:
- The use of linguistic evidence (phonological, morphological,
syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, discourse) in court
to identify speakers and writers of a specific linguistic
variety, style or register.
- The analysis of signature and text forgery with
criminal ends.
- The analysis of authorship attribution of both
spoken and written texts.
- The readability/comprehensibility of legal documents.
- Courtroom discourse.
- Legal interpretation and translation in multilingual
settings (.)"
From a methodological point of view forensic linguistics
expertise and research is implemented by means of a
series of tools, software, and quality statistics which
allow forensic linguists to show a much more rigorous
and scientific performance to be used by the public
administration (magistrates, the judicial school, the
police) and private institutions and companies, and
also by professional people (judges, lawyers, attorneys,
solicitors, notaries, psychologists, doctors).
It was not until the nineties
that forensic linguistics emerged very forcefully. Firstly,
the experts' performance became much more professionalized;
secondly, an increase in the publication of articles
and chapters in a number of forensic linguistics topics
took place, and their content was much more methodologically
grounded than before; thirdly, the International
Association of Forensic Linguistics was founded
in 1992, and finally, Forensic Linguistics: The International
Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, a peer-reviewed
journal published twice a year in June and December,
published its first issue in 1994.
The pioneer, technological and applied character of
forensic linguistics seems to be sufficient to justify
its general and particular interest and thus the organisation
of this workshop, which will become an interdisciplinary
forum of discussion involving the participation of law
scholars, computer science technicians and linguists.
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