INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORENSIC LINGUISTS

Forensic Linguistics

In its broadest sense, “forensic linguistics” covers all areas where law and language intersect:

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Language and Law
Legislation; comprehensibility of legal documents; analysis and interpretation of legal texts; legal genres; history of legal languages; legal discourse; multilingual matters in legal contexts; discourse analysis of legal resources; language and disadvantage before the law; language minorities and the legal system; language rights; power and the law; intercultural matters and mediation in legal contexts.
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Language in the Legal Process
Interviews with vulnerable witnesses; communicative challenges of vulnerable witnesses; police interviews; investigative interviewing; language testing of asylum seekers; bilingual courtrooms and second-language issues; courtroom interpreting; courtroom interaction; courtroom translating; courtroom language; police language; prison language; language addressed to judge and jury in common and civil law courtrooms.
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Language as Evidence
Authorship analysis and attribution; plagiarism; speaker identification and voice comparison; compiling corpora (statements, confessions, suicide notes); computational author identification or profiling; consumer product warnings; language as evidence in civil cases (trademark, contract disputes, defamation, product liability, deceptive trade practices, copyright infringement); dialectology and sociolinguistics; semantics; pragmatics and speech act analysis.
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Research/Teaching
Practice and ethics of expert testimony; presentation of linguistic evidence; linguists as expert witnesses; teaching/testing of forensic linguistics/language and law; language education for law professionals.