Forensic Linguistics. Investigating linguistic evidence with or without distortions

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 74, University of Greenwich (New York College), course: LING1009-Applied Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This essay will present four crimes where the investigation of spoken or written linguistic evidence, corrupt or incorrupt, played a key role to prove the importance of Forensic Linguistics as a discipline.

Forensic linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics, where the accumulated knowledge of theoretical linguistics is applied to the field of forensic investigation in order to interpret linguistic evidence. It is a discipline which is based on the assumption that every person has a unique use of language, which is consistent and cannot be easily altered, almost like a fingerprint, namely the linguistic fingerprint and draws skills from fields such as phonetics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics to apply in criminal investigations. (Coulthard et al., 2016) in cases such as trademark disputes, cases for the defense etc. Forensic linguistics has more than often played a decisive role in the investigation of both spoken linguistic evidence such as recordings and written linguistic evidence, such as text messages, even when this evidence was in some way distorted. This paper will present methods in forensic linguistics and the role played by forensic linguistics in the investigation of written and spoken linguistic evidence in two cases where the evidence was corrupt and in two cases where the evidence was incorrupt.