Annotated Bibliography and References
Baldwin J.R. and P. French. 1990. Forensic Phonetics. Pinter Publishers, London. [The authors, practising phoneticians, describe the rôle of phonetics in criminal inquiries and as evidence in the courtroom. They illustrate voice identification with a number of cases. A very readable book, though regrettably now out of date.]
Cornu G 1990. Linguistique Juridique. Montchrestien, Paris. [A good introduction to Forensic Linguistics in French. In this book the emphasis is on the language of the law.]
Cotterill J: 2003. Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial. Palgrave Macmillan. [This is a detailed account of the trial of OJ Simpson from a linguistic point of view. The author, a professor of linguistics at Cardiff University in Wales, and a practising forensic linguist of international reputation, discusses the trial from many linguistic perspectives. The chapter on narrative discourse in the courtroom is particularly interesting. Cotterill considers research from closely related disciplines including the law itself, sociology, criminology, anthropology and psychology.]
Coulthard M. 1994. On the use of corpora in the analysis of forensic texts. The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law. 1 (1), 27-43. [In this article Professor Malcolm Coulthard, discusses his approach to the Derek Bentley statement (see ‘History and development of Forensic Linguistics to the present’, this article). He illustrates the use of a corpus and how to compile a concordance to illustrate systematicity in what is supposed to be a spontaneously dictated statement. See also: Coulthard M. 1992. Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis. Routledge, Chapter 12: ‘Forensic Discourse Analysis’ (pp 242-254).]
Coulthard M and J Cotterill. 2006. Introducing Forensic Linguistics. Routledge. [In this book the authors provide an overview of the interface of language and the law, illustrated with authentic data and contemporary case studies. Topics include collection of evidence, discourse, courtroom interaction, legal language, comprehension and Forensic Phonetics.]
Eades D 1994. Forensic linguistics in Australia: an overview. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 1 (2) 113-132. [As the title says, the author — a leading forensic linguist practising mainly in Australia — gives a broad picture of Forensic Linguistics in Australia, its beginnings, and details a number of important cases. A key issue in Australia has been the involvement of linguists in analysis of police statements by speakers of Aboriginal English.]
Gibbons J (1996). Distortions of the police interview revealed by videotape. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 3 (2) 289-298. [In this journal article John Gibbons shows how the sequence and content of questions in a police interview structures that interview, and in some cases leading to a distorted representation of an incident and the interviewee’s involvement. See also Gibbons J 1994 Language and the Law, Harlow, Longman. This is Gibbons’ classic book on Forensic Linguistics.]
Goddard C. 1996. Can linguists help judges know what they mean? Linguistic semantics in the court-room. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 3 (2) 250-272. [This journal article, by a semantician, writer and theorist, examines how judges can interpret statutory legal terms in ways that ordinary people can understand what they mean. The author argues against linguists being admitted to courts as experts on the interpretation of the law because lexical semantics is as yet not sufficiently developed.]
Grice HP 1975. Logic and Conversation. In Cole, P & Morgan J (eds.) Syntax and Semantics Vol 3, 41-58. [This is the classic article by Grice on logic in conversation: in it he introduces his famous Conversational Maxims. What is not perhaps always realised is that Grice is essentially a philosopher and that his maxims are a philosophical attempt at the logical structure of meaning. As such they rely on introspection rather than actual data. Essential knowledge for anyone interested in speech act theory.]
Hale S. 1997. Clash of world perspectives: the discursive practices of the law, witness and interpreter. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 4 (2) 197-209. [The writer is a practising interpreter, writer and teacher. In this journal article she discusses the different viewpoints that lay people and lawyers bring to a meeting, based largely on the fact that lawyers, especially in court, do not have the same discourse practices as the rest of us. The problem is exacerbated in the case of a nonnative speaker witness.]
Jackson BS (1995) Making Sense in Law. Liverpool. Deborah Charles Publications. [In this book, Bernard Jackson — a university teacher of law — shows how a core linguistic ‘event’ in the law is the narrative. He analyses the presentation of narratives in court and how the structure and sequence of narratives — prosecution and defence — influences the legal process.]
Kniffka H. 1981, in G PeuserSt. Winter (eds), Angewandte Sprachwißenschaft: Grundfragen – Berieche – Methoden, pp 584-633. Der Linguist als Gutachter Bei Gericht. Überlegungen und Materialien zu einer ‘Angewandte Soziolinguistik’. [The author, Hannes Kniffka, is a well known writer, teacher and practitioner in Forensic Linguistics in Germany. In this paper he reviews the application of linguistics to the court arena and the rôle of the linguist as expert. A must read for those interested in the practice of Forensic Linguistics in Germany.]
Kniffka H. 1990 (Ed). Texte zu Theorie und Praxis forensischer Linguistik. Tuebingen. Niemeyer. [See previous citation. However, this paper focuses on theoretical aspects of Forensic Linguistics.]
Kniffka H. 1994. Understanding misunderstandings in court: “La Serva Padrona” phenomena and other miscommunications in forensic interaction. Expert Evidence: The International Digest of Human Behaviour Science and Law 2 (1), 164-175. [In this paper the author (see previous two citations) discusses a very interesting academic authorship case involving two sisters, law students, who were accused of plagiarising their dissertations.]
Künzel H und Ulrich Eysholdt, 1992. Der Einfluß von Alkohol auf Sprache und Stimme. Heidelberg. Kriminaliste Verlag. [In this paper Hermann Künzel and Ulrich Eysholdt, two well known phoneticians, teachers and writers practising in Germany, give detailed information about the effects of alcohol on speech output and voice characteristics.]
Kuenzel, H.J. Sprechererkennung: Grundzuege forensicher Sprachverarbeitung. Heidelberg: Kriminalistik Verlag, 1987. [Introductory text on Forensic Phonetics in German.]
Hollien, H. The Acoustics of Crime. New York: Plenum, 1990. [An introductory text on Forensic Phonetics.]
Lentine G and R Shuy 1990. Mc-. Meaning in the marketplace. American Speech, 65(4), 349-366. [Genine Lentine and Roger Shuy were involved in the classic trade mark dispute between a famous hotel chain and a famous fast food chain. In their paper they discuss how they researched the uses of ‘Mc’, and how they attempted to persuade the court that, by its very nature, ‘Mc’ could not be the property of a commercial concern such as ‘Macdonald’s’.]
Levi J. Language as evidence: the linguist as expert witness in North American Courts. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 1 (1), 1 – 26. [In this article Professor Judith Levi summarises the kinds of case in which linguistics has played a rôle in US courts. She discusses such cases in which linguistic areas as diverse as phonology, morphology and dialectology have formed part of the argumentation, in social contexts such as historical dialectology and trademark law. In one case a group of recipients of Family Aid brought a class action against the Illinois Department of Public Aid based on comprehensibility issues in a notice sent to aid recipients. Levi’s article also discusses the application of other areas of linguistics to criminal and civil work including semantics, syntax and pragmatics (see Glossary below).]
McMenamin, G. (2002). Forensic Linguistics: advances in forensic stylistics. Boca Raton: CRC Press LLC. [In this book Gerald McMenamin offers a readable and downtoearth explanation of the work of the forensic linguist for the specialist and nonspecialist alike. He concerns himself, and his reader, with such basic questions as ‘What is linguistics?’, ‘What is language?’. ‘How is language acquired?’. McMenamin goes on to discuss a wide variety of authorship markers and the measurement of probability in authorship attribution exercises.]
Nolan, F.J. The Phonetic Bases of Speaker Recognition. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. [A classic but highly readable text on Forensic Phonetics.]
Olsson John 2004. Forensic Linguistics: An introduction to Language, Crime and the Law. London, Continuum. [In this book John Olsson (the author of this article) — a practising forensic linguist in the United Kingdom, writer and teacher, and Adjunct Professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, Nebraska, outlines the main areas of Forensic Linguistics, especially authorship. The book — a practical guide — tends to focus on linguistics in criminal investigations and in the courtroom, with less emphasis on the language of the law. There is also a chapter on phonetics.]
Rose, P. Forensic Speaker Identification. London: Taylor and Francis, 2002. [A recent text on Forensic Phonetics.]
Shuy R 1997. Ten unanswered questions about Miranda. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 4 (2) 175-196 (see Lentine and Shuy, above). [The author, Professor Roger Shuy, shows how the language of Miranda is far from simple and can be interpreted in a number of different ways. He questions the assumption that it is sufficient to read an individual his/her rights for that person to understand what rights he/she a