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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Wiley Series in The Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law
- Sprache: Englisch
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework
Discover more about Forensic Linguistics, a fascinating cross-disciplinary field from an international team of renowned contributors
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework provides an overview of the range of forensic linguistic casework typically found in investigative and judicial contexts. In these case studies, the authors demonstrate how linguistic theory is applied in real-life forensic situations and the constraints and challenges they have to deal with. Drawing on linguistic expertise from the USA and Europe involving casework in English, Spanish, Danish and Portuguese, our contributing practitioners exemplify the most common types of text analysis such as identifying faked texts, suspect profiling, analyzing texts whose authorship is questioned, and giving expert opinions on meaning and understanding.
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework is designed for investigators and legal practitioners interested in the use of language analysis for investigative or evidentiary purposes, as well as for students and researchers wanting to understand how linguistic theory and analysis may be applied to solving real-life forensic problems using current best practice.
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Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law
Series Editors
Graham M. Davies1 and Ray Bull2
1University of Leicester, UK
2University of Derby, UK
The Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law publishes concise and integrative reviews on important emerging areas of contemporary research. The purpose of the series is not merely to present research findings in a clear and readable form but also to bring out their implications for both practice and policy. In this way, the series will be useful not only to psychologists but also to all those concerned with crime detection and prevention, policing, and the judicial process.
Offender Profiling: Theory, Research and PracticeJanet L. Jackson, Debra A. Bekerian
Psychology, Law, and Eyewitness TestimonyPeter B. Ainsworth
Investigative Interviewing: Psychology and PracticeRebecca Milne, Ray Bull
Offenders’ Memories of Violent CrimesSven A. Christianson
Reducing Crime: The Effectiveness of Criminal Justice InterventionsAmanda Perry, Cynthia McDougall, David P. Farrington
The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A HandbookGisli H. Gudjonsson
Stalking and Psychosexual Obsession: Psychological Perspectives for Prevention, Policing, and TreatmentJulian Boon, Lorraine Sheridan
Understanding Criminal InvestigationStephen Tong, Robin P. Bryant, Miranda A. H. Horvath
Tell Me What Happened: Structured Investigative Interviews of Child Victims and WitnessesMichael E. Lamb, Irit Hershkowitz, Yael Orbach, Phillip W. Esplin
Children’s Testimony: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Forensic Practice, Second EditionMichael E. Lamb, David J. La Rooy, Lindsay C. Malloy, Carmit Katz
Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities, Second EditionAldert Vrij
Terrorists, Victims, and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its ConsequencesAndrew Silke
Suggestibility in Legal Contexts: Psychological Research and Forensic ImplicationsAnne M. Ridley, Fiona Gabbert, David J. La Rooy
The use of the Polygraph in Assessing, Treating and Supervising Sex Offenders: A Practitioner’s GuideDaniel Wilcox
Detecting Deception: Current Challenges and Cognitive ApproachesPär Anders Granhag, Aldert Vrij, Bruno Verschuere
Forensic Facial Identification: Theory and Practice of Identification of Eyewitnesses from Composites and CCTVTim Valentine, Josh P Davis
Practical Psychology for Forensic Investigations and ProsecutionsMark R. Kebbell, Graham M. Davies
Communication in Investigative and Legal Contexts: Integrated Approaches from Forensic Psychology, Linguistics and Law EnforcementGavin Oxburgh, Trond Myklebust, Tim Grant, Rebecca Milne
The Psychology of False Confessions: Forty Years of Science and PracticeGisli H. Gudjonsson
Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About AbuseMichael E. Lamb, Deirdre A. Brown, Irit Herschkowitz, Yael Orbach, Phillip W. Esplin
Psycho-Criminological Approaches to Stalking Behavior: An International PerspectiveHeng Choon (Oliver) Chan, Lorraine Sheridan
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic CaseworkRia Perkins, Isabel Picornell, Malcom Coulthard
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework
Edited by
Isabel Picornell, Ria Perkins and Malcolm Coulthard
This edition first published 2022
© 2022 year John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Picornell, Isabel, editor. | Perkins, Ria, editor. | Coulthard, Malcolm, editor.Title: Methodologies and challenges in forensic linguistic casework / [edited by] Isabel Picornell, Ria Perkins, Malcolm Coulthard. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, [2021] | Series: Wiley series in the psychology of crime, policing & law | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021035759 (print) | LCCN 2021035760 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119614579 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119614685 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119614678 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Forensic linguistics. Classification: LCC HV8073.5 .M47 2021 (print) | LCC HV8073.5 (ebook) | DDC 363.25--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035759 LC ebook record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035760
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We would like to dedicate this book to all our friends, colleagues, and family who have supported us, in particular Peter and Anita Perkins, and Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard
Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgement
About the Editors
1 Forensic Linguistic Casework
Section 1
2 The Starbuck Case: Methods for Addressing Confirmation Bias in Forensic Authorship Analysis
3 A Forensic Authorship Analysis of the Ayia Napa Rape Statement Lisa Donlan and Andrea Nini
4 Linguistic Profiling: A Spanish Case Study
5 Other Language Influence Detection: Profiling the Native Language of a Dark Web Pedophile
6 Forensic Plagiarism Detection and Analysis
Section 2
7 Mourning the Slow Death of Miranda: California v. Ceja
8 Detecting Faked Texts
9 Joining ISIS? A Pragmatic Discourse Analysis of Chat Messages in a Counterterrorism Case
10 “I Wanted to Leave A Long Time Ago”: Casework in Suicide Letter Analysis: Methods Used and Lessons Learned
11 Casework in Forensic Linguistics: Looking Outward
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 3
Table 2.1 Linguistic Feature Examples
Table 3.1 List of Comparison Corpora Used
Table 3.2 Relative Frequency and Frequency...
Table 3.3 Relative Frequency and Frequency...
Table 3.4 Relative Frequency and Frequency...
Table 3.5 Relative Frequency and Frequency...
Table 3.6 Relative Frequency and Frequency...
Chapter 4
Table 4.1 Timeline of Nogueira’s Victims and
Table 4.2 Nogueira’s Psychological
Table 4.3 Linguistic Samples Analyzed for
Table 4.4 Instances of Masculine and Feminine
Table 4.5 Examples of Excerpts Where the Author Portrays
Table 4.6 Examples of the Use of Emoticons
Table 4.7 Some Expressions Typically Used
Table 4.8 Chatlog Excerpt Where the Author Describes
Table 4.9 Examples of Lexical Elements
Table 4.10 Checklist of Distinctive Linguistic Features
Table 4.11 Comparison Between the Linguistic
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Tongue Twister Literal Translations
Table 5.2 Article Typologies
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Verbatim Plagiarism
Table 6.2 Instance of plagiarism with alterations to the original
Table 6.3 Example of Reproduction of Mistakes
Table 6.4 Example of Translingual Plagiarism
Table 6.5 Example of Translingual Plagiarism
Table 6.6 Example of Translingual Plagiarism
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Questions and Responses in Spanish and
Chapter 8
Table 8.1 Contextual Audience Analysis (CAA) Toolkit
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 The SNAC Checklist of Linguistic Features
Guide
Cover
series page
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
Series Preface
Acknowledgement
About the Editors
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Series Preface
The Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing, and the Law publishes both single and multi-authored monographs and edited reviews of emerging areas of contemporary research. The purpose of this series is not merely to present research findings in a clear and readable form, but also to bring out their implications for both practice and policy. Books in this series are designed not only for psychologists, but also for all those involved in crime detection and prevention, child protection, policing, and judicial processes.
As the editors of Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework remind us, issues around the authorship and identity of written and spoken words reach back to Biblical times — the origins of the term ‘shibboleth’— through the true author(s) of Shakespeare’s plays and more recently, the musings of Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives. In our current century, these matters have assumed a new significance, where the validity and identity of electronic messaging and voice mail is, for many of us a daily challenge, while academics and students routinely employ the ‘Turnitin’ program to detect and prevent plagiarism.
An earlier volume in the Wiley Series had included some significant contributions on these themes (Oxburgh, Myklebust, Grant, & Milne, 2016), but this is the first book to be devoted entirely to forensic linguistics: an emerging science which combines the insights of psychology and linguistics in new and creative ways. Throughout its development, it has sought to combine theory with application and as the new book illustrates, its progenitors have found themselves caught up in major investigations both in the civil and criminal matters. One early high-profile case concerned the hunt for the serial killer known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. In 1979, the police received a taped message, purportedly from the perpetrator, ridiculing their faltering investigations to date. The tape was passed to linguists at Leeds University who were asked to comment on the accent of the speaker. Their analysis of the cadences led them to conclude that he probably came from the village of Castletown, a suburb of Sunderland. This location fell well outside the suspect search area and was thoroughly investigated before being eventually discounted by the investigators. When the real murderer, Peter Sutcliff, was arrested, it was evident that the tape had been a hoax. The perpetrator, John Humble, who was subsequently arrested and convicted in 2006, had spent most of his life in and around Castletown, so the linguists had been correct in their judgement (Bilton, 2012).
As this case illustrates, forensic linguistics covers a wide and developing field and the editors have sought to impose some organizational structure to encompass the diverse contributions that are celebrated in its pages. One theme which unites all the contributions is the search for objective measures and replicable procedures: in other words, new investigators, faced with the same corpus of material, should independently be able to reach the same conclusions. Section 1 deals with anonymous or disputed authorship: in the opening contribution, Tim Grant and Jack Grieve demonstrate how meticulous regard for objective methods can avoid confirmation bias—the tendency of experts of all shades to report what is expected or invited, a feature of forensic investigation mercilessly exposed through the research of Itiel Dror (Dror, 2018). Section 2 is given over to issues around the meaning and interpretation of spoken and written communications. A forensic linguistic analysis of the police transcripts in California v. Ceja by Gerald McMenamin demonstrates how a Spanish-American defendant failed to understand the intent of the ‘Miranda’ warning, read to all suspects prior to US police interviews, and so lost access to her constitutional rights to be legally represented and avoid self-incrimination. Not for the first, and certainly not the last, time, the Court of Appeal rejected this submission based on the new science. How long, I wonder, before a case occurs in England where a migrant refugee claims not to have understood the implications of the standard Police Caution? They will be fortunate if they have the support of an expert like McMenamin.
The Editors of this new text, Isabel Picornell, Malcom Coulthard and Ria Perkins are all experienced forensic linguists currently or previously associated with the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, which Emeritus Professor Coulthard, a true pioneer of this field, was a founder. In 2019, recognising the growing importance of the discipline, support from Research England enabled the Centre to become the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics with greatly expanded staff and facilities, now under the leadership of Professor Grant.
Methodologies and Challenges in Forensic Linguistic Casework deserves to be widely read by professionals and students of psychology and linguistics and indeed, all those interested in the application of forensic science to language and the new ways in which, text, messages and the spoken word can be analysed to reveal new information about the nature and identity of the authors.
Graham M. Davies
University of Leicester
REFERENCES
Bilton, M. (2012).
Wicked beyond belief: The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
. London: Harper-Collins.
Dror, I. E. (2018). Biases in forensic experts.
Science
, 360( 6386), 243.
Oxburgh, G., Myklebust, T., Grant, T., & Milne, R. (2016).
Communication in investigative and legal contexts
. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our thanks to everyone who has supported and helped us with this book, including the Wiley team, especially Monica Rogers and Christina Weyrauch. We also thank Joyce Laskowski for assisting with the early editing of the chapters.
About the Editors
Malcolm Coulthard is Professor Emeritus of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, United Kingdom, where he founded the Centre for Forensic Linguistics. He was foundation president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and founding editor of the International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and Language and Law – Linguagem e Direito.
Ria Perkins currently works (as a civil servant) for the Ministry of Defence and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics in Birmingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics), and her research and teaching have focused on the application of linguistics in specialist fields. Her casework speciality is forensic authorship profiling, and her research interests include the language of persuasion and power and other language influence detection (OLID).
Isabel Picornell is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics and Director of QED Limited, a consultancy offering forensic linguistic services to the corporate and intelligence sector. She holds a PhD from Aston University (Centre for Forensic Linguistics). Picornell’s research specialties are linguistic strategies of deception in witness narratives and authorship in faked contexts. She is an ACFE certified fraud examiner, a CUBS certified expert witness, and current President of the International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lisa Donlan is an ESRC-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Manchester. Her research expertise lies in employing computational and digital humanities methodologies to explore linguistic hypotheses. For the past two years, she has taught forensic linguistics at the University of Manchester. She has also worked as a research assistant in Andrea Nini’s forensic linguistics consultancy practice, where she uses her computational linguistics expertise to aid in cases of authorship profiling and authorship analysis.
Tim Grant is Director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. He is the author of books, journal articles, and research reports in forensic linguistics and neighboring disciplines. He has provided advice, assisted in investigations, and written expert witness reports for individuals, businesses, and organizations including U.K. and overseas police forces and agencies, and he has given evidence in court for defense and prosecution and in civil cases and arbitration hearings on many occasions. In 2019, Grant was awarded a commendation from the National Crime Agency for his work that helped lead to the arrest of Matthew Falder.
Jack Grieve is Professor of Corpus Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He was previously employed as a lecturer in forensic linguistics at the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University and as a postdoctoral research fellow in the quantitative lexicology and variational linguistics research group at KU Leuven. He received a PhD in applied linguistics from Northern Arizona University in 2009. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, dialectology, and forensic linguistics.
Tanya Karoli Christensen is Professor of Danish language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her involvement in the field of forensic linguistics is a direct extension of her research in functional grammar, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, which are all relevant for the study of language use in legal settings. She currently leads a research project on the language and genre of threats, an important part of which is creating a linguistically annotated corpus of Danish threatening messages. She consults regularly for police and prosecution in criminal cases and for claimants in civil cases.
Gerald R. McMenamin is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at California State University, Fresno, where he began teaching in 1980 following teaching assignments at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, University of Delaware, and University of California, Los Angeles. McMenamin is currently lecturer of Spanish linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research specialties include Spanish linguistics, second language acquisition, stylistics, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. His academic preparation includes a BA (philosophy) from University of California, Irvine; MA (linguistics) from California State University, Fresno; and doctorado en lingüística hispánica from El Colegio de México, México, DF. He is the author of several books and articles, including Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics (2002) and Introducción a la lingüística forense: un libro de curso (2017) and papers on language acquisition, linguistic variation, and forensic linguistics. He presently works as a consultant and expert witness in forensic linguistics.
I. M. Nick holds a PhD in English linguistics (University of Freiburg, Germany), an MA in German linguistics (University of Washington, Seattle), a BA in German language and literature (University of Maryland), a BSc in clinical and social psychology (University of Maryland), and an MSc in forensic and investigative psychology (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom). In summer 2010, she was awarded the German postdoctoral degree, the “Habilitation,” for her research in English linguistics. Within forensic linguistics, her area of specialization is suicide letter analysis. She is a member of the Public Health Committee for the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) and President of the Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics.
Andrea Nini is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in linguistics and English language at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, where he teaches courses in forensic linguistics, stylistics, and quantitative methods. His specialization is the analysis of linguistic data using computational methods, in particular for the study of linguistic individuality and authorship identification. His PhD thesis was on the authorship profiling of malicious texts in forensic contexts, and he has published on the authorship attribution of historical texts such as the Bixby letter and the Jack the Ripper letters. Nini has also carried out research and published in other areas of linguistics such as computational sociolinguistics and register variation. In addition to his academic work, he offers consultancy as a forensic linguist to law firms and law enforcement agencies, predominantly in cases of disputed authorship.
Sheila Queralt Estevez is founder and director of Laboratorio SQ-Lingüistas Forenses. Since 2010, she has undertaken more than 100 consultations in forensic linguistics related to the forensic comparison of written texts and discourse analysis in Spain and abroad (Canada, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, United States, South Africa) alongside different police forces. In 2019, she was appointed mentor of the First National League of Challenges in Cyberspace organized by the Guardia Civil (Spanish law enforcement agency). She is the author of the Decalogue for Requesting a Linguistics Expert Report and Atrapados por la lengua and co-author of Soy lingüista, lingüista forense and Fundamentos de la lingüística forense.
Rui Sousa-Silva is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University of Porto, Portugal. He holds a PhD in forensic linguistics from Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. His primary research areas are forensic authorship analysis, plagiarism detection, and analysis of cybercriminal communications. He is co-editor of the international bilingual journal Language and Law/Linguagem e Direito (with Malcolm Coulthard) and of the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (with Malcolm Coulthard and Alison May).
1 Forensic Linguistic Casework
Isabel Picornell and Ria Perkins
INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXTS
Forensic linguistics has come a long way since the term was first used in Jan Svartvik’s publication The Evans Statement: A Case for Forensic Linguistics in 1968. Since then, an increasing body of research has contributed to the growth and professionalism of this multi- and cross-disciplinary field, with practitioners regularly undertaking forensic linguistic casework.
Forensic linguistics, broadly speaking, is the science of language analysis in a legal context and grounded in established linguistic theory, with practitioners applying linguistic knowledge and methodology to answering questions raised about the status, meaning, and authorship of the communication. Forensic linguistics can be seen as an area of applied linguistics in which techniques of linguistic analysis are applied to forensic situations and data. Linguistics involves the analysis of written texts or spoken interaction by describing and explaining the nature of the communication on a number of linguistic levels using a variety of interpretative tools, theories, and methods. Forensic linguistics essentially takes the linguist’s toolbox and applies it in forensic contexts, where text and speech samples are often unhelpfully short and few in number, in contrast to the large data collections traditionally used in academic research.
PURPOSE AND ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
This book is aimed not only at students, academics, and professionals, but also at anyone interested in the interaction of language and the law and language as analysis for investigative purposes or evidence. Collectively, the chapters exemplify the state-of-the-art application of forensic linguistic analysis. The purpose is to illustrate the diversity of a field where forensic linguists may inform an investigation or a court-of-law and to examine how the professional quality of the linguist’s involvement, findings, and conclusions may be maintained.
Focusing on written (including electronic) communication, across a wide range of contexts, all chapters are authored by accomplished practitioners with consulting experience in their particular field. They discuss actual casework that they have undertaken, demonstrating their methodological choices and how they performed their analysis. The authors discuss and answer linguistic questions on issues as diverse as authorial ownership, communication in faked contexts, and how meaning is understood in today’s multisocial, multilingual society.
As discussed in more detail later in this chapter, this book sets out current “good practice” within the field of forensic linguistic casework. The choice of good practice rather than best practice is a conscious one to reflect the evolving nature of forensic linguistics, which is still a comparatively new field. Technological advances mean that the methodology, the data analyzed, and the contexts in which forensic linguists work are all constantly evolving. The book does not endorse any particular practitioners or promote any methodologies. Rather, it presents practices that demonstrate a high level of rigor and theoretical basis, that work well in the context in which they are applied, that have the potential for replication through their grounding in solid processes and methodologies, that are empirically supported by linguistic theory and research, and that are presented with consideration for their weaknesses and limitations.
The book is divided into two sections according to casework types: Section 1 deals with disputed and anonymous authorship analysis, while Section 2 addresses issues of meaning and interpretation.
Section 1: Anonymous and Disputed Authorship Analysis
This section’s five chapters present different forensic linguistic approaches to dealing with challenges posed by questioned authorship. Tim Grant and Jack Grieve open this section in Chapter 2 with an authorship verification analysis for a police investigation. The chapter raises issues associated with cognitive biases and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of stylistic and stylometric approaches in this closed-set authorship verification problem. In contrast, in Chapter 3 Lisa Donlan and Andrea Nini face an authorship issue that they address by using authorship profiling in a Cyprus-based court case. Here, the emphasis is not on comparing texts but on building a socio-demographic profile of its author to determine whether that profile matches that of its stated author.
While Donlan and Nini’s case involves English speakers, in Chapter 4 Sheila Queralt deals with a long-running Spanish-language police investigation, illustrating how forensic linguistic analysis is applied to a language other than English. Queralt demonstrates how mixed methods approaches involving linguistic profiling and stylometric and stylistic analyses can contribute positively when working alongside other forensic sciences. In Chapter 5, Ria Perkins undertakes Other Language Influence Detection (OLID), linguistic profiling intended to indicate the first language of an author based on how they write in a second language. The section ends with Chapter 6, in which Rui Sousa Silva addresses a different type of authorship problem: detecting and analyzing for plagiarism. Sousa Silva’s discussion around the different strategies that plagiarists employ to steal other people’s written productions extends to the non-English-speaking world and highlights the growing problem of translingual plagiarism.
Section 2: Meaning and Interpretation
These chapters are concerned with casework covering linguistic analysis of how language is produced and how we derive meaning from it. In Chapter 7, Gerald McMenamin provides a strong opening to this section on how immigrant and multilingual communities are denied their constitutional rights and due process because of their lack of understanding of the English language. In this American court case centering on the admissibility of evidence provided during police interviews, judges in the trial and appellate courts concluded that a Hispanic woman understood English sufficiently well to waive her Miranda rights to not self-incriminate, in spite of linguistic evidence to the contrary.
This is followed by Chapter 8 on linguistic “oddities,” in which Isabel Picornell and Malcolm Coulthard discuss how language design alerts linguists to the possibility that the context in which it has been produced has been faked. Coulthard addresses the linguistics of faked confessions, while Picornell demonstrates how being alert to linguistic red flags can identify falsified contexts that are not initially apparent.
From identifying language that is wrong for its context, we move to assessing purpose and the implicit meanings conveyed by an utterance. Deriving meaning from language in context is central to Tanya Karoli Christensen’s analysis in Chapter 9 of ISIS recruitment chat logs to assist the police in understanding what the individuals concerned were discussing.
Finally, I. M. Nick concludes with an analysis of the language of suicide. Chapter 10 demonstrates the increasing cross-disciplinary mix of linguistics and forensic behavioral sciences to create new areas of research—in this case, suicidology.
FORENSIC LINGUISTIC CASEWORK
Traditionally, forensics has been defined as relating to the legal (civil or criminal) field, or a legal context setting. This association can be seen with other fields that contain the term “forensic” in their name, such as forensic sciences or forensic psychology. The self-definitions of such fields virtually always highlight their application within legal settings. For example, the stated aim of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences is to “advance science and its application to the legal system” (American Academy of Forensic Sciences, n.d.); the British Academy of Forensic Sciences defines forensic science as “the application of science to the law, both civil and criminal” (British Academy of Forensic Sciences, n.d.).
The question arises as to whether it is the data, the analysis, or the application that makes a linguistic analysis forensic. Much valid work considered to be forensic linguistics would not immediately fall under the legal association of “forensic”. Areas of work such as understanding the language of mis- or disinformation or influence and radicalization for defense and security purposes do not have such a clear and direct legal association, yet they may easily be considered forensic.
In dictionaries, the word casework is normally associated with social work involving an individual’s personal history or circumstances (e.g., OED third edition, 2014). In the context of forensic linguistics, analysts also apply their skills, experience, and knowledge to direct considerations of a particular personal situation. However, rather than relating to information on the personal circumstances of a specific individual or group, it instead relates to language data, created by individuals or groups, that is examined in investigatory situations.
The requirement for forensic linguistic expertise is one that arguably evolved from necessity. Early work in forensic linguistics was exceedingly casework driven. Investigators and lawyers were encountering the need to analyze language as evidence or challenge linguistic perceptions and interpretation, and it was clear that analysis grounded in linguistic theory had the potential to assist lawyers and judges in their work.
Svartvik’s The Evans Statements (1968) is often considered to be the first organized call for the creation of a forensic linguistic science, a field that undertook systematic analysis of language data in forensic settings. His monograph demonstrated how linguistics and casework-oriented linguistic analysis based on the study of observed data could contribute to an improvement in justice and how a better understanding of how language worked could help.
Other publications followed, revolving around how practitioners applied their linguistic knowledge in legal and courtroom setting. Articles and books such as Roger Shuy’s Language Crimes (1993), Coulthard’s A Failed Appeal (1997), and Lawrence M. Solan and Peter M. Tiersma’s Speaking of Crime (2005) were seminal works that introduced readers to evidential shortcomings and misconceptions related to language within the criminal justice system. Reviewing their own and other legal cases and the linguistic evidence relevant to their determination, these pioneering practitioners demonstrated how linguistic knowledge and approaches could be applied in new, varied, and (most importantly) useful ways to assist the legal system and improve the delivery of justice.
Although the academic field of linguistics was not formalized until the early 1970s, there is evidence of forms of linguistic analysis being used in forensic contexts from much earlier periods. The identification of perceived enemies on the basis of their language can be traced back to as early as the biblical story of Shibboleth:
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him,Artthou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;Then said they unto him,Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.Then they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12:5–6)
Similarly, in World War II, Dutch border patrols sought to identity Germans pretending to be Dutch travelers by requiring them to say the city name Scheveningen. Dutch and German grammar have different phonetic rules for pronouncing the word-initial “s,” much less “s” + “ch,” which would make it largely unpronounceable to anyone except a native Dutch speaker. Although this is arguably forensic phonetics rather than forensic linguistics, it does demonstrate how deeply ingrained language analysis is in society. Today, the term shibboleth applies to any word that identifies a person as belonging (or not belonging) to a particular group.
Perhaps the earliest example of a type of forensic linguistics being proactively applied is to the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century falsification of a fourth-century document. The papacy had claimed vast territories and spiritual and temporal powers on the basis of a grant by the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great. In 1440, the Italian philosopher and literary critic Lorenzo Valla applied his knowledge of Latin grammar and rhetoric to analyzing the Donation. Valla demonstrated that the document could not have originated in the fourth century as the Latin in it was inconsistent linguistically and stylistically with that of the period. Consensus now has the Donation to be an eighth-century ce creation, probably originating from within the papacy itself (Frontini et al., 2008).
In 1628, a similar analysis by the Calvinist theologian David Blondel concluded that the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore, a collection of 500 years of letters and decrees providing the legal basis for papal independence and powers, was also falsified. Blondel demonstrated how the documents’ creator(s) lifted words, phrases, and entire sentences from documents allegedly authored hundreds of years later and strung them together to create the faked documents. Several red flags included phrases whose meanings in the later documents (from where they had been “borrowed”) had evolved to mean something else from that intended in earlier periods.
The understanding that it was possible to perform linguistic analysis and that it might be useful in forensic contexts eventually found its way into a number of fictional texts. In the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” (Doyle, 1891), the famous detective Sherlock Holmes performs a form of authorship profiling on an anonymous note addressed to him. Holmes states that the author of the note must be German on the basis of grammatical constructions in the note and, in particular, the placement of part of the verb in the sentence: “This account of you we have from all quarters received” (Doyle, 1891, p. 63).
Holmes performs a basic contrastive analysis between various languages, concluding that “a Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs” (Doyle, 1891, p. 63; see also Boucher & Perkins, 2020). The significance here is that, by Arthur Conan Doyle’s time, there was some inherent understanding that it was possible to identify an anonymous author’s native language from the way they used a second language.
In a much later suspense-crime novel, The Devil’s Teardrop (1999), its author Jeffery Deaver demonstrates the importance of understanding cross-linguistic influences on written language. His fictional forensic linguist and document examiner Parker Kincaid highlights that linguistic features contained in a threat letter did not correspond to patterns in a number of unrelated languages that one would expect from a genuine non-native English speaker. This led Kincaid to conclude that the author was only pretending to be foreign.
These imaginary scenes from crime fiction are precursors to many elements in current day authorship profiling, identifying sociolinguistic and dialectal features that allow analysts to make inferences regarding the linguistic persona authoring a text. We see real-life applications of authorship profiling approaches within this book in Chapter 3 on the Cyprus faked confession, in Chapter 4 on the Spanish fraudster Rodrigo Noguera Iglesias, Chapter 5 on the darkweb pedophile, and in the analysis in Chapter 9 of understanding ISIS communications.
Much has changed since those early attempts to explain how language worked or did not work in certain contexts. In the last 40 years, forensic linguistics has coalesced into an applied field of its own, taking knowledge from different areas of linguistics and applying it to forensic contexts such as language-based issues in the legal system.
Given that linguistic analysis encompasses every aspect of language, casework is very varied. Forensic linguistics extends beyond just linguistics and into multidisciplinary approaches, either through teamwork or by individuals with experience in other areas. Indeed, linguistic analysis has been applied to research and forensic contexts in areas such as psychology, as can be seen in Chapter 10 on the language of suicide.
Casework is also rarely as straightforward and conclusions never as certain—certainly never expressed in percentages as portrayed on television and films. This exaggeration of forensic linguistic analysis capability creates a CSI effect that real-life analysts cannot live up to. Chapters 4 and 8 demonstrate how client instructions and linguistic questions evolve as cases progress, especially when forensic linguists become involved at the outset or in the early part of an investigation. Features in the data may suggest to the analyst that a reformulation of the linguistic question is necessary; for example, what the client may believe is an authorship question may instead be a question of context falsification.
DOING FORENSIC LINGUISTICS
What constitutes being a “forensic linguist”? It is not a formally recognized profession, nor is it statutorily regulated (Clarke and Kredens, 2018). One does not have to be a forensic linguist to “do” forensic linguistic analysis. Being a forensic linguist may, perhaps, be best described as an identity, one taken on by professional practitioners when undertaking forensic casework involving linguistic analysis. However, that identity is dependent on practitioners grounding their analysis of language in linguistic theory. An in-depth understanding of how language works and familiarity with the analytical tools available from the forensic linguistic toolkit is material to competently undertaking analysis. Without integrating linguistic theory into language analysis and an appreciation of the underlying reasons as to why linguistic patterns occur and the external influences that give rise to variations in those patterns, conclusions drawn on the identification of linguistic patterns are meaningless (Nini, 2018).
There is a disconnect between the work of forensic linguistic researchers and forensic linguistic practitioners in that research often assumes idealized case situations whereas, in reality, forensic linguistic casework practitioners have to work with nonidealized data. Furthermore, research tends to be tightly focused on a narrow aspect of forensic linguistic analysis, whereas casework can be messy in approach and data.
In real-life cases, data can be very varied and often very limited. Donlan and Nini (Chapter 3) worked with an 85-word statement; Picornell (Chapter 8) worked with emails 57 to 350 words long, totaling some 1,650 words for each author. At the other extreme, Queralt’s data (Chapter 4) covered more than 10 years and comprised over 300,000 words of emails and chat logs. Comparison data can also be limited, so much so that practitioners end up comparing material from different genres, for example, letters with diary entries or emails. Grant and Grieve’s comparison data (Chapter 2) of 28,000 words in the same genre for their known author is very rare indeed.
GOOD PRACTICE VERSUS BEST PRACTICE
This book provides examples of forensic linguistic casework employing current good practice. It must be stressed that no claim is being made that the processes and methodologies applied constitute best practice—each case is unique, and the field continues to evolve as research develops and technology advances. The evolution of language, as well as its complexity and incredible diversity of contexts, also precludes a one-size-fits-all approach. The variety of work undertaken is very broad, both in practice and potentiality. Due to the variation in both, what is often encountered in forensic linguistic casework, and what could be encountered, makes it impossible to detail what best practice would be across cases. The best methodological approach for a specific case depends on the type of available data.
We can, however, talk about best practice at a higher level, where what matters is that the analyst’s approach is measured, scientifically rigorous, and validated. At the casework consultation level, this requires that analysts be aware of the limits of their analysis (Clarke and Kredens, 2018), staying within the bounds of their own expertise, recognizing the dangers of confirmation bias (as stressed in Chapters 2 and 9), and grounding conclusions with linguistic explanations. It also involves managing client expectations about what linguistic analysis can realistically achieve and providing them with the reasoning behind any conclusions or opinions. This is important in aiding investigators, law enforcement, and lawyers to assess the strength and weaknesses of forensic linguistic analysis as an evidential resource. This becomes even more important when forensic linguists act as expert witnesses. Tensions exist between lawyers who aim to win their case and analysts who should be acting as objective and independent experts. In this scenario, the forensic linguist’s overriding duty is to the trier-of-fact, the court, assisting it to reach informed decisions, irrespective of who instructs and pays them.
For the most part, the obligation to behave responsibly and professionally in all aspects of professional life is policed by self-regulatory organizations, where such expectations are set out in their codes of conduct. In the case of forensic linguistics, no such regulatory organizations exist. Although expectations of professional, objective, and impartial behavior are set out in the Code of Conduct of the International Association of Forensic and Legal Linguistics, the association has no regulatory mandate. In many countries, expectations, as to the professional behavior of expert witnesses and their duty to the court, rely on relevant case law.
However, in England and Wales, these expectations are enshrined in law. The Civil and Criminal Practice Rules (CPR 35 and CrimPR 19, respectively) require expert witnesses to confirm that they are aware of their overriding duty to the court and that they have complied with it. Among others, these duties include staying within their area of expertise; providing objective, unbiased, and independent opinion; clearly setting out the reasoning behind their conclusions; and identifying the limitations and weaknesses of their case. It is for lawyers to argue the strength of the evidence, not for experts to act as advocates for their case.
THE FORENSIC LINGUISTIC PRACTITIONER
As already stated, there is no regulatory body or a set of required qualifications to become a forensic linguist, although there is ongoing debate and discussion around their professionalization and how clients may be assured as to a forensic linguist’s expertise and the methodologies they employ.
The best methodologies are those that have been identified as valid and reliable. These tend to have at least an element of computational analysis, largely for document comparison in authorship analysis (Chapter 2) and plagiarism (Chapter 6) but also including forensic authorship profiling (Nini, 2018).
However, many documents in forensic contexts tend to be short and therefore not suitable for computational analysis, or the document may not be compatible with the genre of texts on which the technology was originally developed and certainty levels tested. Much of forensic linguistic analysis is described relative to existing linguistic theory to cope with the complexities of language and inconsistencies within linguistic variation between individuals. This descriptive analysis is insightful, based on years of linguistic experience and a wide knowledge base, describing linguistic behavior and interpreting features using established linguistic theories as to how language works under certain circumstances (Chapters 3 and 8). These descriptions may be supported by recourse to online reference corpora allowing for expressions of uniqueness for a particular linguistic feature in a population.
This descriptive approach does not always rest comfortably with expectations of certainty that legal practitioners and the courts have become used to from other forensic sciences, resulting in lawyers and judges not always finding linguistic analysis persuasive. Judges, like linguists, are in the business of interpreting meaning. However, they may not realize that their evaluation of linguistic competency is not the same as a linguistic methodological evaluation; consequently, judges may not always appreciate a linguistic “expert” explaining to them how the language would be interpreted under certain conditions. Forensic linguists are acutely aware of how courts may disagree with their findings, however competent the linguistic analysis (Chapters 3 and 7; also see Coulthard, 1997). Therefore, the success or failure of a case is not always a good indication of how good or bad a linguistic methodology is.
Insistence on conclusion certainties comes with its own problems, such as those associated with black box technology. While there may be certainty regarding the input text data and expressions of certainty regarding the output conclusions, the internal analytical process is opaque. In deep learning systems, calculations are so complex, numerous, and variable that they may not be directly understandable by their own creators. We often do not actually know how much individual features contribute to final outcomes or how accurately the post hoc explanation reflects the actual computational process because calculations are not accessible. It is often impossible to determine whether the “explanation” that analysts provide for the calculations is actually what the black box model processed (Rudin, 2019).
Until forensic linguistics research is able to arrive at a wide range of replicable valid and reliable methodologies, clients and judges need to be able to assess an analyst’s proficiency (Solan, 2020). In the first instance, it is our belief that, as a minimum, forensic linguistic casework analysts should have a PhD and have conducted recent relevant research.
One of the main issues in such casework is being aware of and dealing with confirmation bias. In investigative contexts where clients look to analysts for assistance in guiding the direction of investigations, this may be easier to manage. It becomes more difficult when investigators require confirmation of a suspicion they hold or when requiring reports for trial and analysts are aware of the outcomes their instructing clients would like to achieve. Research demonstrates that people are more likely to gravitate toward the evidence that confirms positions they support and underplay evidence that detracts from it.
One model we have found useful is for linguists to work in pairs: one linguist to act as an intermediary or case manager to coordinate with clients, collect necessary facts surrounding the investigation plus any potential data, and help formulate the linguistic question(s), thereby distancing the second linguist, who undertakes the analysis, from external influences, minimizing the risk of confirmation bias (see Chapter 2). This approach is not always possible, depending on client confidentiality requirements or where analysts are sole practitioners. Aspects of analysis may also rely on knowing some of the sociolinguistic background of suspected authors and their addressees, requiring disclosure of this information to the analyst, as seen in Chapter 8. It is a difficult but necessary balancing act that relies on a professional and informed relationship between analysts and their clients.
LOOKING FORWARD
Several fundamental points come through repeatedly as one reads through the chapters. These provide insight into the interesting directions in which forensic linguistic analysis and casework is expanding.
Forensic linguistic casework does not occur in isolation. There is, and should always be, a close, two-way relationship between casework and research. Analysts’ ability to perform casework relies on a considerable amount of constantly evolving research involving multidisciplinary cooperation to conduct meaningful relevant research. To be truly effective, research has to be grounded in practical realities, which is where casework comes in. On the one hand, casework provides insights into real-life contexts, with its unknowns and unexpected complications. In the face of uncertainties, casework forces practitioners to apply their wide range of theoretical linguistic knowledge into critically exploring the situations they are confronted with, asking what might really be going on, instead of simply addressing the obvious question (Stepney & Thompson, 2020; see also Chapter 8 in this volume). Research, on the other hand, particularly inter and multidisciplinary research, moves forensic linguistics into exciting new areas, which can only benefit both practitioners and clients.
It is exciting to see the increase of complementary degrees in linguistics and disciplines such as psychology, law, and computer science, providing invaluable cross-disciplinary expertise in analyzing casework data. Such forensic linguistic casework also feeds into improving practices in other fields and into improving society as a whole. Legal linguistic studies improve understanding of how legal concepts are understood by lawyers and laypeople, facilitating the translation of legal texts in transnational organizations such as the European Union. Greater collaboration between linguists and computer scientists and statisticians improves machine-learning sophistication and accuracy rates with the incorporation of linguistic knowledge (Nini, 2018). Increased language awareness, generally among law enforcement and legal professionals, would go a long way toward highlighting the potential for discrimination in multilingual societies, reducing the linguistic misunderstandings that can result in miscarriages of justice.
These are exciting times for forensic linguists and forensic linguistics casework, and we hope that this book will contribute to a better understanding of the field.
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Section 1
2 The Starbuck Case: Methods for Addressing Confirmation Bias in Forensic Authorship Analysis
Tim Grant and Jack Grieve
