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Forensic Linguistics Many people have not ever wondered how many different languages are spoken in the world. If a person is interested how a child begins to speak and acquire the knowledge of language, or how computer is taught to understand language, he has to begin studding linguistics. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. The study begins with evolution, analyzing origins of the language, and how it is used in the society. This science is formed of different fields of studding speech sounds, parts of sounds, word and sentence formation and some others. It is also the aim of linguistics to go through the history and find out why a language is like it is now.
Linguistics studies the relationship between society and language, the way how we produce and understand language and how the language used in the law. This is the point where we will focus our attention. We have learned a little what linguistics is about, and we will look from the point of linguistics at the language that is used in legal affaires. In a word, forensic linguistic is the field that we will discus.
Throughout the paper, we will try to find out what the forensic linguistics is about. It looks like it not an easy case to define forensic linguistics in one sentence. The true meaning of this science goes far beyond the words. Forensic linguistics is the science of measurements of documents which relate to the law. In this case, the objects analysis can be statements made by an accused person, or a papers that is said to be plagiarized. By the way, I hope my paper will not be an object of such an analysis.
We come again and again to the definition of forensic linguistic to obtain a broader understanding of this advanced science. Forensic linguistics also examines statistics to determine phrase of sentence usage in the text to find out how many times they are repeated. If a person write paper himself, he usually uses phrases that are standard to his speech. If it is seen that the style of language changes, it usually points that the person borrowed this material from somebody's work.
There are some other techniques to determine plagiarism. In many cases, lawyers ask for consulting from forensic linguists on behalf of clients who are accused in taking illegal actions in violating authorship rights. Corporations take legal action against other companies and use the service of forensic linguists. Sometimes, individuals try to determine the authorship of texts with the help of linguist specialists.
Forensic Linguistics is an introduction of a cooperative world of language and the law. If we come back to the history and essence of law, we will see the essential role of the language that puts the law into the verbal form. Since laws are encoded into language and language is used to its construction, we can conclude that the law is a part of linguistics institution. And this institution is called forensic linguistics. Forensic linguistics also explores the language of contracts and the language of court processes. The importance of language in court trials becomes tremendous and influences the court verdicts over the accused people.
Sometimes, the linguist opinion puts a dot in a long sentence of a trial process. It resemble me a butter fly landing on a balance scale of justice, making the basis for decision making. Another part of Forensic Linguistics leads to more social direction. It discusses and explains the difficulty connected with understanding legal language. It also considers legislation on language and includes language crimes analysis.
Not so long ago, Language and the law was a sub-field of social linguistics. Now, it became an independent area of study. Lawyers and linguists collaborate with each other to settle justice and reveal the truth. Most of the work in the field of forensic linguistics approaches legal cases from the language point of view. For example, trial lawyers learn to avoid language usage that introduces unwarranted assumptions, such as When did you stop beating your wife? They do not learn about presuppositions and the logical structure of language.
Thats linguistics, which is the science that describes and explains language. 1 Such approach is considered to be correct in the courtroom. When a lawyer interprets a testimony spoken in an uncommon dialect, the focus must be on what the words mean in that dialect. In no way, the right linguistic questions should be about where this dialect come from or whether it is regional. Another important question that the person, who speaks an uncommon dialect, is not usually ignorant. People do not usually know that all languages are composed of dialects. From the linguistic point of view, the standard language is a dialect.
It is not better or worse language for use than any other. At least, this is the view point of forensic linguistic. Lets take a court issue example to understand better what was said above. This is a widely used law instance to explain the significant role that linguistics play n the court issues. This is the case in which linguistic matters, had the important influence on the outcome of the case. A jury had found a man guilty of selling a gram of cocaine to an undercover police officer.
The judge was to sentence him to 10 years of prison. In the cornerstone of the case was the analysis of a tape recorded before the arrest. The tape contained the accused persons voice as the drug dealer. Some recorded testimony from his trial as part of the analysis was used. The matter was to view voice exemplars of both him and the arresting officer to compare with those on the tape. The main point of the prosecution in this litigation was that the defendant had been a linguist in the army.
It gave him the ability to change his voice by dropping his dialect English, and speaking English without a foreign accent. In the description of the case, there were several paragraphs of testimony where a lack of knowledge of linguistic concepts could critically influence the outcome of the trial. The weak point in the prosecutions case was that the voice of the accused person, and the voice of the drug dealer on the tape, sounded different. The defendant spoke English with a accent, which indicated bout his foreign origin. But, to the view of the prosecutor, the defendant could change his accents, because he was a translator at the army.
We have an example in which a small amount of linguistic knowledge would change the course of justice. With the absence of that knowledge, the prosecutor was free to argue speciously that the defendant could speak English without an accent if he wanted. It explained why the person on the tape spoke without an accent. Such statement pointed on the guilt of the defendant. A person with elementary knowledge of linguistics, would know the difference between linguist, translator and interpreter.
He knows that being an translator gives no special ability to speak without an accent. The defendant is probably innocent of the crime for which he was finally convicted. In this case, he might be victim of ignorance, which can result of the absence of the basic knowledge of linguistics. Should a part of a legal education include elementary knowledge of linguistics? It should.
But, it is more important that a part of a general education include the fundamentals of linguistics. I think, it is important to have knowledge about the basics of linguistics the same as the students of high school study the basics of astronomy and chemistry. Have you ever wondered how to make click sounds such as occur in languages like Zulu, or what particular qualities you need to include in your speech if you want to mimic some accented English? Did you ever wonder about things like voiceprint's or the recorded speech of someone over the telephone can be used as evidence in a trial? John Gibbons, a researcher of applied linguistics, states that linguistics is about studying the ways people make speech sounds and how speech sounds are organized into systems into languages.
Linguistics aims to make you understand the kind of phonetic processes that occur in the languages. 2 According to some web resources, the forensic linguistics discipline includes the study of a number of areas, which have to do with the use of linguistic evidence within diverse public contexts and professional areas. The use of linguistic evidence in court is to identify speakers and writers of a specific linguistic style, like in the example that we discussed above. The forensic linguistics also includes the analysis of signatures and text patterns. From a methodological point of view, forensic linguistics research is implemented by means of a series of tools, software, and quality statistics which allow forensic linguists to show a much more rigorous and scientific performance to be used by the and private institutions. Forensic linguistics appeared in the nineties, and claimed about itself very strongly in the trial procedures.
After it emergence, the experts' work became more professional. The increase in the publications in a number of forensic linguistics topics took place. The content of these publications became much more methodological. The related institution was founded in 1992. It was the International Association of Forensic Linguistics. The pioneer, technological and applied character of forensic linguistics seems to be sufficient to justify its general and particular...
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Research essay sample on Forensic Linguistics Part 1
