Papers by CFL staff and students at the 9th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists

Matthew Baldock
Acquitted: Mentally Unstable

A number of court cases conclude with the defendant being found 'not guilty' on account of being mentally unstable. There is a growing body of literature on how mental illness and disorders can lead to a variety of linguistic changes or markers (e.g. Fine 2006) and on providing psychological profiling from linguistic output (e.g. Estival et al 2007). This paper examines whether such markers can be found in language produced by mentally unstable persons in police interview and courtroom encounters. Data in this paper is taken from police interviews and courtroom records in fully resolved cases where a person was acquitted on the grounds of being mentally unstable. Using research literature and adhering to definitions of depression, schizophrenia and neurosis (provided in the ICD-10 and GSM VI guidelines for diagnosis), I will describe the language features and evaluate whether these could be-10 and GSM VI guidelines for diagnosis), I will describe the language features and evaluate whether these could be used diagnostically to determine whether a suspect or defendant suffered from one of the aforementioned disorders. Finally I will evaluate whether such judgements might have any practical application either for investigators or for the judicial system.


Malcolm Coulthard
Whither Forensic Linguistics?
(Plenary address)

In the fifteen years since the founding of the Association, Forensic Linguistics has made significant advances in each of its three major areas, the Language of the Law, the Language of the Legal Process and Language as Evidence. In this plenary address I will review some of the major achievements in the discipline and comment on where current trends might lead. Among topics I will focus on are legal-lay communication, investigative interviewing, interpreter mediated interaction, author assignment and expert evidence.


Tim Grant
Professionalisation and standards in forensic linguistic practice.

The UK's Council for the Registration of Forensic Practitioners opened its register of Forensic Linguists and a separate register for Forensic Speech and Audio Science in September 2008. This talk will describe and examine the process of the CRFP in deciding to open a linguistic register, the motivations of the group of practitioners in pursuing collaboration with the CRFP and the negotiations within practitioner groups in arriving at a prescription for competent practice. The CRFP processes and the criteria for a competent linguistic expert report will be described and exemplified using a series of real case examples which both do and do not meet the criteria. Discussion of the criteria will show how their existence can contribute to improved practitioner decision making at all stages of analysis and report writing. Finally a comparative analysis will be undertaken of similar initiatives being made internationally and consideration made of the establishment of the IAFL professional practice committee. Conclusions will be drawn about the increasing professionalisation of forensic linguistic practice and the implications this has for the field.


Kate Haworth
The discursive construction of evidence in the police interview: case study of a rape suspect

Baldwin (1993) comments that police-suspect interviews in the UK are less of a 'search for truth' than 'mechanisms directed towards the "construction of proof"' (1993: 327). This paper will demonstrate how proof, in the form of criminal evidence against a suspect, is constructed discursively during the police-suspect interview, but that this is by no means a transparent or neutral investigative process. It raises serious questions about the quality and integrity of the resulting evidence.

The analysis will take the form of a case study of an interview with a rape suspect. An interdisciplinary, multi-method approach will be taken, combining legal and linguistic analysis. This utilises elements of conversation analysis, sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, including consideration of 'audience design' (Bell 1984), and the narrative construction of identity (e.g. Schiffrin 1996).

We will examine how the interviewee's account is actively created through the interview, demonstrating that this is a process of collaboration and co-construction between interviewer and interviewee. Yet they are far from equal collaborators. Detailed discursive analysis shows that for most of the interview this process works to construct evidence which helps build only the prosecution case. But a striking feature of this interview is a discernible shift in the interviewers' position, away from the interviewee's guilt and towards the possibility that an offence did not take place. Once the interviewers have shifted position in this way, this results in the emergence of significant pieces of evidence which now support the interviewee's defence. This is a worrying indication of the extent of the influence of interviewers over an interviewee's account, and of the consequent dangers of interviews only producing evidence which supports the scenario upon which the interviewers are currently working.

Further, it cannot be overlooked that that this shift towards believing the interviewee rather than the complainant, and the consequent emergence of evidence which assists the defence, occurs in a case of rape. Although it would be wrong to draw specific conclusions from one case, the findings of this study nevertheless make a useful contribution to wider deliberations over the treatment of rape complaints in the criminal justice system.


Krzysztof Kredens
'I never said that!' The problem of translated records of interpreted police interviews with suspects

In forensic linguistic discussions of interpreted police interviews with suspects the focus has been on ways in which semantic misrepresentation arises and how it could affect the administration of justice. This paper looks at another linguistic layer of potentially adverse influence on the investigative process, that of translated transcripts of tape-recorded interviews conducted with the assistance of an interpreter. In England transcripts of interpreter-mediated interviews are prepared in English and can subsequently be translated for the benefit of the non-English speaking suspect. This kind of translation poses interesting strategic questions per se but is fraught with problems when the translator has no access to the original recordings and relies solely on the transcript, which in turn can itself be inaccurate. In such cases the suspect's original narrative may differ significantly from the one in the translated version of the interview, a problem with interesting implications for the criminal justice system.

I will take a global look at the pre-trial procedure followed with non-English speaking suspects in England, identify problems arising when they request a translation of the interview transcript, and make some recommendations. To illustrate my points, I will use language data from a murder case heard recently at Birmingham Crown Court.


Nicci MacLeod
'So did you actually see him...': Discourse markers, formulations and narrative evaluation in police interviews with rape complainants

The treatment of rape complainants within the UK justice system and media has received much scrutiny in recent times from feminist researchers and policy makers alike. Specifically, the way in which the police investigate such crimes has been criticised, not least in terms of officers' undue scepticism caused by an overestimation of the scale of false allegations (HORS 293).

This paper draws on a corpus of DVD recordings of UK police interviews with rape complainants in order to illustrate the effects of certain discourse markers in evaluating interviewees' contributions. It further demonstrates how these markers are utilised to focus on details perceived to be of investigative value to the police institution, and of evidential value to the judge and jury (the eventual audience, or 'superaddressee' (Bakhtin, 1986)). Examination of the use of 'so', for example, reveals how it is often used to focus on details perceived to be of evidential value, and to successfully elicit reformulations from interviewees (Johnson, 2002). In this context, the details perceived to be of value can be shown to relate to pervasive ideologies surrounding sexual violence, such as the complainant's behaviour, her capacity for knowledge (as in the title of the paper), and her relationship with the suspect. Similarly, 'well' is shown to indicate a challenge to the appropriateness of the interviewee's previous answer, indicating that it is in some way deficient (Lakoff, 1973), and thus encourages elaboration or reformulation. In the data, these challenges to the appropriateness of interviewees' responses can, again, be shown to relate to prevailing beliefs about rape. Through the use of these markers the officers minimise the importance of other details perceived as salient by the interviewee, often removing them from the account altogether. Furthermore, officers themselves make use of formulations (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970) in order to negotiate and transform the naďve account provided by the interviewee into an investigatively and evidentially valuable narrative. Discourse markers and formulations are shown to recurrently contribute to the dialogic, or negotiated nature of the complainant's account. A discussion of how these findings reveal the extent to which the negotiated account relates to the dominant 'common sense' ideological resources surrounding sexual violence, and the implications of this for the treatment of complainants, will also be incorporated.


Ria Perkins and Tim Grant
Indicators of authorship by a L1 German speaker for English texts

Based on the concept from language teaching that native speakers of certain languages make distinctive errors when writing in English, this study is designed to investigate how a native speaker of German would be influenced by their mother tongue when writing in English. The study evaluates the weight of evidence of the possibility of using language in order to determine national origin without falling foul of the oversimplification of the possible variations within any language or L1. The study will show that it is possible to draw conclusions from an English text that can help indicate if the author is a native German speaker or not.

The study compares two corpora of texts written in English by students from a British University; one corpus comprising of texts by native English students and the other by students for whom English is their second language and German their first. The study examines common errors, lexical and grammatical choices in order to demonstrate which signs may indicate that the author is an L1 German speaker and the density of signs needed to draw satisfactory conclusions.


Isabel Picornell
A Strategy for Deception Detection: Collective Cues to Deception in Written Text

Many misconceptions abound as to what constitute lying behaviour. According to Vrij (2008), people are taught incorrect cues, and then perpetuate the myths, making them poor detectors of deception. In the case of law-enforcement practitioners of statement analysis, reliance is placed on a number of 'experts' whose expertise is based on long years of personal experience, with no theoretical underpinning for their claims other than 'it works'. They apply the same cues to both verbal and written deception by English or Spanish persons, whether they be native or non-native speakers.
Identifying deception is difficult. Deceivers do not always lie in the same way, and individual behaviour can vary between contexts, topics, and even within individual interview situations. In short, there is no single cue that we can rely on to spot deception all the time. However, cues do appear, and previous research suggests that the most effective way of identifying deception is by looking for cues in a combination of movements, voice, and speech content (Vrij 2008).

However, deception in the written context has none of the behavioural or vocal cues available in conversational/interview situations. The lie detector is therefore limited to analysing written text for linguistic indicators of the strategies, emotions and cognitive loading associated with deception.

My research into deception in written criminal witness statements suggests that collective cues are indeed effective indicators of deception. While individual cues themselves may not always be the same, certain groups of features, such as personal pronouns and cognition words, indicators of distancing and cognitive loading, capture linguistic cues of deception that are likely to arise. Interestingly, preliminary results suggest that some features, considered indicators of truthfulness in verbal deception, are suggestive of deception in written text.

This presentation will report on current work, part of a larger research agenda, directed at a more systematic approach to the detection of deception in written text.


Rui Sousa Silva, Belinda Maia and Tim Grant
When news becomes a forensic issue

Forensic linguists, amongst others, have a strong interest in plagiarism detection (Angélil-Carter, 2000; Coulthard & Johnson, 2007; Hänlein, 1998; Lobo, 2003; Semple, Kenkre, & Achilles, 2004) but there is relatively little research attention on bilingual plagiarism. The borderline of plagiarism is both dependent on its definition and on the author's intention, as much as it is on the text genre: the usage of large amounts of text by journalists with little or no attribution at all, for instance, does not seem to be usually regarded as plagiarism (Coulthard & Johnson, 2007). However, although the conventions/regulations regarding use of newswire copy are not universal, agencies require that the source be credited, and forbid the use of 'authored articles'.

Detecting verbatim copying of news agencies words is easy and straightforward. However, plagiarism detection requires more sophisticated techniques when news items are plagiarised in languages other than English (e.g. Portuguese), where journalists tend to translate the text intuitively into their mother tongue and make adjustments, while retaining a structure that is more similar to the English counterpart than to the other news sections.

To investigate which mechanisms journalists use to write 'their own' texts from news agencies texts (and how they use them), we selected news pieces from the 'World' section of Portuguese quality newspapers and compared them to possible English sources. To do a suitable contrastive analysis, we created a comparable/translation corpus ('LREC 2008 Workshop on Comparable Corpora' 2008; McEnery & Wilson, 1996) using the Corpógrafo (a web-based environment for the creation and analysis of personal corpora) (Sarmento, Maia, & Santos, 2004).

We then investigated how translation is usually done by journalists and how (and when) authorship attribution is made explicit, and questioned how much unacknowledged journalistic text can be accepted without being called plagiarism, challenged by the news agencies and proceed to trial. The results obtained so far show that, even though quality papers may cite their sources (usually well-known international agencies), attribution is often inadequate, and there is not a one-to-one match between the Portuguese and the English versions, i.e. the same piece of news often includes different releases from the foreign press and websites. Applications of this investigation to more forensic contexts will be discussed.

References

Angélil-Carter, S. (2000). Stolen Language? Plagiarism in Writing. Harlow: Longman.
Coulthard, M., & Johnson, A. l. (2007). An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. Londres e Nova Iorque: Routledge.
Hänlein, H. (1998). Studies in Authorship Recognition - A Corpus-based Approach Francoforte: Peter Lang.
Lobo, R. A. (2003). Plagiarism Revisited. Journal of the Society for Gynecologic Investigation, 10, 389-389.
LREC 2008 Workshop on Comparable Corpora (2008). Retrieved 02/11/2008, from http://www.limsi.fr/~pz/lrec2008-comparable-corpora
McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (1996). Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction (Second Edition ed.). Edinburgo: Edinburgh University Press.
Sarmento, L., Maia, B., & Santos, D. (2004). The Corpógrafo - a Web-based environment for corpora research.
Semple, M., Kenkre, J., & Achilles, J. (2004). Student fraud: The need for clear regulations for dismissal or transfer from healthcare training programmes for students who are not of good character. Nursing Times Research, 9(4), 272-280.


David Woolls and David Hallmark
Plagiarism of the greatest ever theory or just simultaneous discovery of the theory of evolution?

2009 sees the 150th anniversary of the publication of 'The Origin of Species' by means of Natural Selection and the 200th anniversary of the birth of its famous author Charles Darwin. Our quest is to apply contemporary plagiarism software and methods in a forensic analysis of published texts by Darwin and Wallace to resolve the oft-repeated allegation that Darwin adopted and adapted the words and work and conclusions of Wallace and presented them as if his own original theory of the evolution of species. We do this by examining the relationship between the central chapter of this book and the document which prompted its publication from a number of perspectives, historical, geographical and social as well as linguistic. The document to Darwin by Alfred Russel Wallace from Ternate, in what is now part of Indonesia, and received by Darwin on 18th June 1858. The title was: 'On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type', and one section heading in particular indicates its closeness to what 'The Origin of Species' is known for, 'The Struggle for Existence'. This latter is the heading of the third chapter of Darwin's book, the chapter in which he expounds his theory of Natural Selection. We outline Darwin's reaction and that of his associates to this letter and the events that followed, which resulted in the publication of his book on 24 November 1859. We also provide a brief overview of the questions that have been raised concerning the relationship pf Darwin's work to that of Wallace from the very outset. Darwin's assessment on receiving the letter was: 'So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed, though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.' The forensic linguistic focus of the paper is on a detailed examination of the content of the letter with chapter 3 of 'Origin', and some of the previous drafts containing elements of the final theory, with a view to discovering whether there is linguistic evidence that Darwin incorporated some of Wallace's material in this chapter without acknowledgement. Darwin acknowledges Wallace's importance in the field in his introduction, but in chapter 3 makes no reference to him, while including other authors as antecedents to elements of his theory. We explore whether there is evidence of a shift of emphasis in the explication of the theory which had been forming in Darwin's mind over his years of study of the problem, which can directly traced back to Wallace through this and an earlier letter sent by him to Darwin in February 1855. The exploration makes uses of the latest developments in detailed comparison of two documents for vocabulary, phrase and sentence similarities. We show how both some of the illustrations used by Darwin and his terminological expression of the theory have antecedents in Wallace's letters.

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