John Olsson

3RD D N DITION ON

3RD 3RD 3RD EDITION EDITION EDITION

LINGUISTICS LINGUISTICS LINGUISTICS JohnJohn Olsson John Olsson andOlsson June and Luchjenbroers and June June Luchjenbroers Luchjenbroers

Forensic Linguistics

Also available from Bloomsbury Analysing Police Interviews, Elizabeth Carter Definition in Theory and Practice, Roy Harris and Christopher Hutton Language and the Law, Sanford Schane The Language of Crime and Deviance, Andrea Mayr and David Machin Wordcrime, John Olsson

Online materials for this book are available at www.bloomsbury.com/forensic-linguistics-9781441170767

Forensic Linguistics THIRD EDITION

JOHN OLSSON AND JUNE LUCHJENBROERS

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

First Published in India 2017 First published 2014 © John Olsson and June Luchjenbroers, 2014 Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This edition published with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50, Bedford Square, London, WC1B3DP All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. John Olsson and June Luchjenbroers have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-9-38660-649-5 For sale in the Indian subcontinent only Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd Second Floor, Building No. 4 DDA Complex LSC, Pocket C – 6 & 7 Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070 www.bloomsbury.com Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed at Repro Knowledgecast Limited, Thane

This book is dedicated to those we love . . . and to all those who approach the field of forensic linguistics with an aim of making a difference

CONTENTS

List of figures xii List of tables xiii Acknowledgements xv Foreword xvi Who should use this book? About the authors xvii

Introduction

xvii

1

What is forensic linguistics? 1 The language of the law: Meaning 1 The discourse of the law 3 Authorship attribution 4 History of forensic linguistics in practice Outline of this book 9

7

PART ONE Language as forensic evidence Introduction to Part One

13

1 The road to authorship

15

The beginnings of literacy 15 The role of memory in language 15 Orality in early written language 16 The transition from orality to literacy 19 The fi rst author? 20 Conclusion 20

2 The author constructed

23

The doctrine of authorship 23 Authorship as an individual act 23 Text as property 24 The genius of the author 25

13

CONTENTS

viii

Style 26 Social factors and language style Aspects of style 30 Conclusion 32

3 Time, variation and genre

28

33

Introduction 33 Expected and unexpected relationships in the genre domain 34 The genre institution and the author space 35 Comparison across genres 35 Testing author-genre relationships 36 A corpus of 32 novels 37 Entropy and ectropy in the language system 47 Conclusion 47

4 Range of variation

49

Individual range of variation 49 Variation and interpersonal relationships 52 Is variation random? 55 The token ‘you’ as a variable in the mobile phone text corpus The ‘-ing’ inflection 58 Conclusion 59

5 Textual variation

56

61

Register factors 61 Non-register factors 68 Polyphonic factors 71 Conclusion 81

6 Forensic phonetics: An introduction by Harry Hollien Defi ning forensic phonetics 83 Signal analysis 84 Speech decoding and transcripts 91 Authenticating recordings 94 Behavioural analyses 99 The aural–perceptual approach 105 Machine–computer approaches 110 Natural speech vectors 113

83

ix

CONTENTS

Validating the approach 117 Detecting behaviour from voice 120 Alcohol–speech relationships 124 Detection of deception 129 Evaluations 133 Forensic phonetics continues to develop

7 Cybercrime

136

137

Introduction 137 Types of e-crime 138 Conclusion 151

PART TWO Dealing with linguistic evidence Introduction to Part Two

8 Forensic texts

155

155

157

What types of forensic text are there? 157 What are typical features of different types of forensic text? 157

9 Forensic transcription

165

The text is the evidence 165 Transcription exercises of audio material

10 Forensic authorship in practice

168

171

Introduction 171 Notes on preliminary procedures 171 An example of imitation 172 Exercise commentaries 197

11 Investigating author variation in naturalistic data

219

The corpus 219 The texts 220 Variables 220 The study 220 Conclusion regarding the experiment into naturalistic data

225

12 Forensic linguistic evidence in court The texts in the case 227 The features in the texts 229

227

CONTENTS

x

The prosecution report 230 Conclusion 235

PART THREE The legal process: Language and the law 237 Introduction to Part Three 237

13 Power in legal contexts: The courts Power in court 239 Rules of questioning 246 Linguistic disadvantages before the law Conclusion 261

239

257

14 Power in legal contexts: The police Situational features and rules of behaviour ‘Verballing’ in police testimonies 264 Police and the ‘right to silence’ 265 Conclusion 267

15 Vulnerable witnesses

263 263

269

Vulnerability and the law 269 Children as vulnerable witnesses 270 ‘Intimidated’ witnesses and rape 274 Disabilities and the legal process 275 Courtroom interpreting and translation 276 LADO assessments and the forensic linguist 276 Conclusion 277

PART FOUR

Language of the law

279

Introduction to Part Four 279

16 The law and us

281

The meaning of words 281 What does malice mean? 282 Conclusion 284

17 The language of statutes

285

The language of statutes and the language of courts

285

xi

CONTENTS

Am I entitled to a lawyer? 286 In all criminal prosecutions 289 High legal art and judicial disingenuousness The grading of probability 302 Where actus commences 303 Attitude to risk 304 Conclusion 304

294

Appendix 1: Forensic texts 309 Appendix 2: Exercises and exercise commentaries 315 Appendix 3: Active researchers in the field of forensic linguistics 321 Bibliography 323 Author Index 343 Subject Index 347

FIGURES

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 6.19 6.20 6.21

Expected relationship between genre internal authors 34 Unexpected relationship between genre internal authors 35 Expected genre-internal relations 36 Unexpected transgenre relations 36 Number of texters who share corresponding features 51 Distribution of ‘you’ forms in subject S’s texts 54 Transistor frequency response 86 An energy-by-frequency (or ‘instantaneous’) spectrogram 88 A digital spectrogram of the ‘waterfall’ type 88 Filtering patterns 89 Masking of sounds 90 Waterfall plot of a rerecorded interrupt (such as a splice) 98 ‘Sequential’ approach to earwitness identification 103 Speaker identification 108 An aural–perceptual speaker identification evaluation form 111 Computer-based speaker identification 112 LTS vector 115 TED vector 115 SFF vector 116 VF vector 117 Printout of normalized SAUSI data 118 Two-dimensional continua from normalized data 120 Voice and speech shifts – psychological stress 123 Change in intoxication level as a function of ingesting ethanol 126 Perceived intoxication levels versus measured levels 127 Shifts resulting from increasing intoxication 128 Sensitivity measures 135

TABLES

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 6.1 8.1 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9 10.10 10.11 10.12 11.1 12.1 12.2

Same author match for the 32 novel corpus 40 Excerpt from Mill on the Floss data (George Eliot) 43 Excerpt from Lifted Veil data (George Eliot) 43 Mean HFL scores in descending order 44 Level of same author match 44 Mean frequencies and deviations for ‘the’ by author 45 Mean time lapse (in years) between each author’s works 46 Range of variation in known and questioned emails – examples 50 Forms of ‘you’ used by a group of five pre-teen females 53 Data for predominantly ‘you’ users 56 Data for predominantly ‘u’ users 57 Results of SAUSI experiments carried out in the 1990s 119 Expressions of negativity, chaos and disorder 159 Questioned texts 173 Victoria Couchman texts 173 Tony Couchman texts 175 Q features with candidate features 179 Q features with Victoria Couchman’s features 180 Q features with Tony Couchman’s features 182 Summary of fi ndings 183 Features shared exclusively across Q and the candidates 183 Descriptions of the alleged assailant 198 Use of postposed ‘then’ 199 Landmarks 201 Table of examples of anomalous language from the statement 202 Showing the degree of variation found in group of 53 texters 221 Table of mobile phone texts in the case 228 Table of features across the text set 229

xiv

12.3 12.4 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4

TABLES

Inconsistent features in the victim’s texts 231 List of shared features across known and suspect texts 234 Broad distribution of contribution types by testimony phase 249 Distribution of sentence types by testimony phase 252 Distribution of sentence types by assumed witness sympathies 253 Distribution of answer types by assumed witness sympathies 254

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my co-author Dr June Luchjenbroers for her input into this third edition, and to thank readers of the fi rst two editions for their support through the last nine years: it is the readers who really make a book. June and I would also like to thank Gurdeep Mattu and Andrew Wardell of Bloomsbury for their most professional and courteous assistance in taking this book through the various stages of production. We have tried to remain true to the spirit of the fi rst edition – to keep this book as a teaching and learning aid – and we hope that students and lecturers will continue to fi nd it helpful as they make their fi rst forays into forensic linguistics. John Olsson May 2013

‘This book ‘Thisisbook vitalisreading vital reading for students for students ‘This andbook researchers and is vitalresearchers readingofforforensic students of forensic and linguistics researchers linguistics and of forensic will and linguistics undoubtedly will undoubtedly and will undoubtedly help tohelp cement to cement interest interest in the in field. the Itfield. is helpstunningly toIt cement is stunningly interest comprehensive, in the comprehensive, field. It is stunningly addressing addressing comprehensive, a generous aaddressing generous range a generous rangerange of forensic-related of forensic-related themesthemes and issues: and ofissues: forensic-related from cyber-terrorism from cyber-terrorism themes and issues: to suicide from to cyber-terrorism suicide notes.notes. It takes to suicide It takes in notes. spoken, inIt takes spoken, in spoken, writtenwritten and computer-mediated and computer-mediated communication, written communication, and computer-mediated examines, examines, incommunication, detail, in detail, keyexamines, studies key studies inand detail,cases, key andstudies cases, andand cases, and and is written is written in a limpid in a limpid and engaging and engaging style. is written The style. in book a limpid The also book and engaging usefully also usefully style. includes The book includes aalsonumber usefully a number includes of practical aofnumber practical of practical exercises exercises and insightful and insightful commentaries commentaries exercises whichand which willinsightful prove willcommentaries prove invaluable invaluable which to readers will to prove readers invaluable wishing wishing totoreaders sharpen towishing sharpen to sharpen their forensic their forensic analytical analytical sensibilities. sensibilities. their Thisforensic new Thisanalytical edition new edition sensibilities. of Forensic of This Forensic new Linguistics edition Linguistics of Forensic is a joy is Linguistics ato joy read, istoa read, joy to read, and I will andbe I will recommending be recommending it to allit oftoand my allI will of students be myrecommending students interested interested it to allinof the my students in interface the interested interface between in the between interface language between language language and society.’ and society.’ and society.’ KevinKevin Harvey, Harvey, Lecturer Lecturer in Applied in Applied Sociolinguistics, KevinSociolinguistics, Harvey, Lecturer University in Applied University of Sociolinguistics, Nottingham, of Nottingham, University UK of Nottingham, UK UK

3RD 3RD EDITION EDITION

3RD EDITION

E

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