A fascinating guest post today from Dr Tim Grant, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University in the UK, and the Director of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics there. His main research interests are in forensic authorship analysis and in the conversations which occur between attackers and victims in cases of serious sexual assault and rape. He has publications in both of these areas in both psychology and linguistics journals. His consultancy has largely involved the analysis of abusive and threatening communications in many different contexts including investigations into sexual assaults, murder and terrorist offences. It has also included cases of copyright infringement and academic plagiarism.
Tag Archives: forensic linguistics
Conference – Language and law ‘in paradise’ (Brazil)
Actually ‘paradise’ is just my interpretation 🙂 – Language and the Law – Bridging the Gaps is the first international conference to be jointly sponsored by ALIDI (the newly formed Association for Language and Law for Speakers of Portuguese) and the IAFL (International Association of Forensic Linguists). The official languages of the Conference will be English and Portuguese.
The conference will be hosted at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.
A call for papers, posters, themed colloquia and roundtables is currently being made – topics include the following indicative but not exclusive list:
Day course on forensic authorship analysis (UK)
The Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University in the UK is organizing a day course on Forensic Authorship Analysis on Tuesday 19th March 2013.
“Linguistic evidence of who wrote a text has been increasingly accepted in the UK Courts and recent criminal cases have included murder, stalking, extortion and blackmail. The subject of these analyses can vary from long fraud documents or terrorist conspiracy texts, through shorter letters, blog posts or emails, to very short texts such as SMS text messages, Twitter streams or Facebook status updates.
Article about forensic speech analysis & new magazine
A new language and linguistics magazine has just been launched that might interest you. The quarterly is called “Babel” and this is the editors’ description:
“Whilst Babel is written in English, it will address issues relating to many different human languages, including those under threat of disappearing as well as the world’s major languages. There will be regular features, such as biographies of influential thinkers on language (‘Lives in Language’) and explanations of technical terms (‘A Linguistic Lexicon’) and there will also be feature articles on topics of general interest as well as regular quizzes and competitions.”
Canadian radio show discusses court interpreting
Babel, a new show on the Canadian radio station CBC Radio One hosted by an Argentinian with a passion for languages “explores the impact of diversity, technology, and community on Canadian English”.
This 28-minute episode of the show discusses a variety of language-related topics including multilingual families, court interpreting, medical interpretation and forensic linguistics.
Conference – Forensic Linguistics, Oporto, Portugal
The Faculty of Arts/Faculty of Law of the University of Porto (Porto, Portugal) will host the 3rd European Conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists on the theme of Forensic Linguistics: Bridging the Gap(s) between Language and the Law.
The conference, which is organised jointly by the two Faculties, aims to bridge the gap(s) between language and the law by sharing the latest research in the field of forensic linguistics/language and the law, and will be held from 15 to 18 October 2012.
What exactly is forensic linguistics?
This post tries to collect together a few definitions of a subject that is in the news more and more often – forensic linguistics.
The 2010 publication The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics states, in its introduction: “Forensic Linguistics is the study of language and the law, covering topics from legal language and courtroom discourse to plagiarism. It also concerns the applied (forensic) linguist who is involved in providing evidence, as an expert, for the defence and prosecution, in areas as diverse as blackmail, trademarks and warning labels.”
From Words to Deeds: translation & the law 
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