The 12th International Summer School on Forensic Linguistic Analysis took place between July 16th and 20th at IULA. This Summer School was an intensive five-day event focussing on the role, shape and evidential value of language in legal and forensic settings. It was structured around two levels – introductory and advanced -, run in paralel and around the study of the three main domains of forensic linguistics: the language of the law, the language of the court and language as evidence. The school involved not only teaching issues relevant to this discipline, but also research and expert witness work concerned with real forensic linguistic cases. It attracted attendance from students all over the world who were taught and supervised by international teaching staff from the UK, the USA, Australia and Spain.
During this edition and the School's previous editions, the following topics and modules have been covered: analysis of legal discourse, structure and semantics of statutes and legal instruments, legal translation and interpreting, speech style in the courtroom, social organisation of conversation in legal settings, structure of cross-examination, sociopragmatic aspects of interpreting in court, comprehensibility of legal instruments, language and disadvantage before the law, linguistic minorities and linguistic human rights, forensic authorship attribution, forensic phonetics, trade name and domain name disputes, and many others.
The International Summer School in Forensic Linguistic Analysis was created by Prof. Malcolm Coulthard in 2000 in response to a growing demand for a course affording an overview of forensic linguistics while also laying solid foundations for a further study of the area, working with authentic language data and use real cases to illustrate theory.
The School's first edition took place at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge and was followed by three more events in Birmingham and one in Lodz, Poland. Since 2006 the School was held at Aston University. This year two editions were held. One in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), in its introductory track, and one in Barcelona (with an introductory and an advanced track), in the latter case organized by Forensiclab at IULA, under Professor Malcolm Coulthard’s (Emmeritus professor at Aston University) and Professor M. Teresa Turell’s (professor of English Linguistics and director of ForensicLab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra), institutional supervisión and Dr. Krzyzstof Kredens’s, also at Aston University, academic coordination.
Over the years, the school has attracted almost 300 participants from all continents and over 30 countries and the teaching staff has included: Aldridge (Cardiff University, UK), Broeders (Leyden Law School, NL), Butters (Duke University, US); Cotterill (Cardiff University, UK), Coulthard (Aston University, UK), Eades (University of New England, NSW, Australia), Fitzgerald (FBI, US), French (JP French Associates and York University, UK), Harrison (JP French Associates and York University, UK, Heffer (Cardiff University, UK), Grant (Aston University, UK), Kredens (Aston University, UK); Leonard (Hofstra University, US), Rock (Cardiff University, UK); Schilling (Georgetown University, US), Solan (Brooklyn Law School, US) and Tiersma (Los Angeles Law School, US).
In this 12th edition the academic tutors included: Caldas-Coulthard (Universidade d’Indianàpolis, Brazil), Coulthard (Aston University, UK), Eades University of New England, NSW, Australia), Johnson (Leeds University), Kredens (Aston University, UK); Turell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Watt (York University) and Woolls (CFL Development).
The local organising committee included: Núria Gavaldà (PhD candidate in FL), Sheila Queralt (PhD candidate in FL) and David García Barrero (PhD candidate in FL).
More information at https://www.forensiclinguistics.eu/
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