Forensic Linguistics: Language and the Law

This course focuses on the role that linguistics and languages play within the rapidly growing field of forensic science; namely forensic linguistics. Forensic linguistics is a diverse field that not only has applications in legal and criminal investigations, but also makes important contributions to the military, government and business, and can contribute to literary, historical and cultural studies. In this course we go through the various sub-fields and issues of forensic linguistics; for example, voice comparison, speaker profiling, authorship analysis, disputed utterance, plagiarism, transcription, translation-interpreting, interrogation and verballing, while explaining the nature of linguistic evidence and the role that linguistics and languages play in the legal proceedings. We also learn about the use of computational and statistical tools in linguistic analyses. The course has no prerequisites; the necessary basic linguistic and statistical ideas and tools will be introduced and explained.