| The Forensic Linguistics Laboratory (ForensicLab) at Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA) is a centre at Universitat Pompeu Fabra that develops teaching and research activities in forensic linguistics, and makes use of linguistic evidence for forensic purposes in Court. It is a section of the research group (SGR2005-00272), known as Unitat de Variació Lingüística (UVAL), whose activities are structured around the Theory of Language Variation and Change, a model that attributes internal and external validity to teaching, research and expert witness work in forensic linguistics.
Definition of Forensic Linguistics
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 text forgery with criminal ends.
- The analysis of authorship determination/attribution of both spoken and written texts, and plagiarism detection.
- Readability/comprehensibility of legal documents.
- Legal and courtroom discourse.
- Legal and support interpretation and translation in multilingual settings.
There is a broad definition of Forensic Linguistics, which covers all the areas where language and law overlap; and a narrow definition, which refers specifically to expert evidence in court on linguistic matters. The journal, Forensic Linguistics: The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law clearly follows the broad definition, with articles on legal and courtroom discourse and interpreting, for instance, and throws in Forensic Phonetics and Phonology, Authorship Determination/ Attribution, and Plagiarism Detection for good measure. The International Association of Forensic Linguists, as an association, follows the broad definition, accepting conference papers on a wide range of topics in language and the law. The association's website again follows the broad definition and it is only in a courtroom that one might wish to use the narrow definition, for the benefit of the legal profession when they are concerned with obtaining expert evidence.
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 (judicial school, police,) and private institutions and companies, and also by professional people (judges, lawyers, attorneys, solicitors, notaries, psychologists, doctors).
Previous work on this area
During the sixties, the seventies and the eighties, mainly in the US and Canada, lawyers, judicial police and other professional people devoted to the investigation of crime, had been requesting linguists their expertise in relation to issues related to language and the law. However, their performance was very isolated and their methodology not very extensively sustained around parameters of internal and external validity.
In Europe, pioneer studies on forensic linguistics can be traced back to 1985, when experts were called in court to contribute their expertise in authorship attribution both of spoken and written texts. But 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 Phonetics (IAFP) (St. John's College, York) - at present, International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA) - was founded in 1991 and the International Association of Forensic Linguists, in 1992, and finally, the journal Forensic Linguistics (at present: The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law) published its first issue in 1994 and counts on 15 issues at the moment.
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