Verbatim Record
Definition
A written document that purports to record speech word-for-word, such as a typed-up police interview or a court transcript. Linguistic analysis of a verbatim record can assess how closely the written text matches the claimed speaker's habitual language patterns.
- Form
- Typed-up police interview or court transcript claiming word-for-word accuracy
- Use
- Linguistic comparison against a claimed speaker's habitual language
- Landmark case
- Svartvik's 1968 statistical analysis of the disputed Timothy Evans statement
- Risk
- Editing during transcription can insert the transcriber's own phrasing
Common questions
How does linguistic analysis use a verbatim record?+
An analyst compares vocabulary, sentence structure, and idiolect in the record against known samples of the claimed speaker's language to judge whether the wording plausibly originated with that person.
What went wrong when a record was not truly verbatim?+
In the Evans case, forensic linguistics later showed that officer-influenced phrasing in the statement resembled police language more than the defendant's own speech, undermining the safety of the original conviction.
Related terms
- Corpus Linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- Entrapment Analysis
- The examination of recorded conversations between undercover law-enforcement agents and suspects to assess whether the agent's language induced the suspect to commit...
- IAFL
- The International Association of Forensic Linguists, founded in 1992, is the main professional body for the field. It publishes the journal Language...
- Linguistic Profiling
- Broadly, any use of linguistic features to infer a speaker's identity or background. In its pejorative sense, the discriminatory use of accent...
- Stylometry
- The quantitative measurement of writing style, using features such as sentence length, word frequency, function-word distribution, and character n-grams. Stylometric methods now...