Forensic Linguistics

FORENSIC LINGUISTICS

Academic research on the intersection of language and the law is a relatively recent phenomenon. Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application forlinguists working in forensic contexts - understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes and the provision of linguistic evidence.
The mention of legal language tends to conjure up in the mind of the layperson “legalese” ─that often incomprehensible verbiage found in legal documents as well as an arcane jargon used among attorneys. To elucidatehow this “special dialect” came about and how it differs from “ordinary English”, researchers have turned to the language of the law as a linguistic phenomenon in its own right, tracing its evolution and noting the peculiarities of its vocabulary and sentence structure. In fact, one of the first scholarly publications about law and language was David Mellinkoff´s monumental work, The Language ofthe Law, published in 1963. A more recent book, Legal Language by Peter Tiersma, thoroughly explains why legal language is so often difficult for nonlawyers to comprehend. It is full of wordiness, redundancy, and specialized vocabulary and it often contains lengthy, complex, and unusual sentence structure.
Jurors do not always understand fully the instructions given to them by judges. To get at theroot of this problem, Robert and Veda Charrow, psycholinguists, conducted several experiments. They had a group of subjects, who were Maryland citizens eligible for jury duty, listen to a tape recording of jury instructions. The subjects were to paraphrase what they heard to the best of their abilities. Surprisingly, almost half of the information was missing from some of the paraphrases. Whatexactly was causing the incomprehensibility? The difficulty was due, not so much to vocabulary items, but mostly to particular types of grammatical constructions, such as the occurrence of multiple negatives and the excessive use of passive sentences and of nominalizations.
The research into juror´s potentially poor comprehension alerted the legal community, and in an effort to tackle the problemsome states have been revising their instructions. Here is an example of an old California instruction and of the corresponding new one written in “plain English”. Both attempt to explain the distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence:





Old California instruction
Evidence consists of testimony, writings, material objects or other things presented to the senses and offered toprove whether a fact exists or does not exist.
Evidence is either direct or circumstantial. Direct evidence is evidence that directly proves a fact. It is evidence which by itself, if found to be true, establishes that fact.
Circumstantial evidence is evidence that, if found to be true, proves a fact from which an inference of the existence of another fact may be drawn. A factual inference is adeduction that may logically and reasonably be drawn from one or more facts established by the evidence.
It is not necessary that facts be proved by direct evidence. They may be proved also by circumstantial evidence or by a combination of direct and circumstantial evidence. Both direct and circumstantial evidence are acceptable as a means of proof. Neither is entitled to any greater weight thanthe other.

New Instruction
Evidence can come in many forms. It can be testimony about what someone saw or heard or smelled. It can be an exhibit admitted into evidence. It can be someone´s opinion.
Some evidence proves a fact directly, such as testimony of a witness who saw a jet plane flying across the sky. Some evidence proves a fact indirectly, such as testimony of a witness who saw...