Forensic Linguistics

What forensic linguistics is, where it came from, and the landmark cases and scholars that defined it as a discipline. Covers the Evans case and Jan Svartvik's corpus analysis, Malcolm Coulthard's work, and the field's relationship to general linguistics.

The science of determining who wrote an unknown text: function-word profiling, n-gram analysis, stylometric distances, machine-learning classifiers, and the major real-world cases that tested the methods.

How forensic linguists analyse threatening communications, ransom notes, and suicide notes: credibility assessment, authorship features, comparison with genuine examples, and the limits of what linguistic analysis can establish.

How legal texts are written, how jurors and defendants misunderstand them, and how linguistic analysis serves interpretation disputes in contracts, statutes, Miranda rights, and jury instructions.

How language works in custodial interrogations: power and control, question types, false confession mechanisms, the PEACE model, SCAN statement analysis and its critique, and how recorded interviews become evidence.

Computational and manual methods for detecting text reuse in academic, commercial, and legal contexts, and the linguistic analysis of trademark and brand-name disputes.

Language evidence in digital contexts: text-messaging style, online grooming patterns, disputed authorship of digital communications, and the emerging challenge of AI-generated text.

The language of the courtroom: witness examination, lawyer questioning strategies, cross-examination discourse, interpreter accuracy in legal settings, and the ethical and quality standards that govern forensic linguistic practice.