Mention linguistics and the law, and most people think of police cases involving handwriting or stylistic analysis to develop a writer profile for some piece of evidence -- for example, the ransom note in the JonBenét Ramsey murder investigation, or the Unibomber Manifesto. Although written language analysis has a long history of use, both in police investigations and in courtroom trials, and is, perhaps, a prototype of so-called forensic linguistics, it is but one task among many performed by forensic linguists today.
This paper gives an overview of modern forensic linguistics and discusses the increasingly important role of linguists and of linguistics in police investigations, courtroom trials, and other areas where language and the law intersect.
There is no consensus among linguists and legal experts as to a definition of the term forensic linguistics. Some adhere to a narrow definition such as "the use of linguistic techniques to investigate crimes in which language data constitute part of the evidence."1 Others subscribe to a broad interpretation of forensic linguistics as the study of the intersection between language and the law. Within this broad view, forensic linguistics encompasses the following areas of study:
legal language comprehensibility and reform
courtroom discourse
court translation/interpretation and cross-cultural communication facilitation
acoustic analysis of audio-recorded evidence
speaker profiling and speaker identification