GIAN course- Forensic Linguistics

FORENSIC LINGUISTICS

Recently I attended 'GLOBAL RELEVANCE OF FORENSIC LINGUISTICS a Short Term GIAN Course' hosted by Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh' in a virtual mode, from 24/05/2022 to 28/05/2022. The program was coordinated by Dr. Noman Tahir. Lectures were on various topic by Prof. Tej K. Bhatia, Prof . M.J. Warsi, Dr. Sweta Sinha, Dr. Abhinav K. Mishra and Dr. Grace Sunnetha. It was really an enlightening course. This blog deals with my course learning outcome.

Forensic Language can be known as legal language or the language of the law. It is a method and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime, investigation, trial and judicial procedure. According to National Geographic, Forensic Science is emerging as a new science of solving crime and the vibrant field. Looking in a broader way, Forensic Science bridges between forensic science and psychiatrist.

Studying human language scientifically is called linguistics. When applied to a particular social setting, in this case the legal forum, it is termed as Forensic Linguistics. Forensic linguistics emerged in two paths: one, Miranda Vs Arizona case (1966) in US. And in the UK when Svartvik proved that language itself can be forensic evidence. Before the emergence of FL, the major focus of argument was only police statements. Suspects were supposed to dictate their statements which were never interrupted or interrogated by police.

Finally in 1988 FL came into limelight, when Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) organized a two- day FL conference. IT pioneer Phonetic Acoustic method of speaker identification. Later various FL conferences were organized like in France (1991), Britain (1992) Australia (1995) and US (1997). Later in !990s FL began as a teaching stream but still it was not as formal schooling.

The discipline of FL does consistently improve its methodology in investigating information. There is heavy emphasis on people's ability to recall information. While today it faces problems because of burgeoning and frequently changing cyber fields.

Forensic linguistics is considered to be a game changer solution. Many times it happens that while a case study there is complete absence of physical evidence like DNA, hair, blood sample, saliva etc. in such a situation use of FL is activated. FL evidences human lives, evidences like manifestos, ransom notes, Letters and in the digital world mails, messages etc. are preferred. Example for the use of digital evidence is the Michelle Carter case. Also the case of El Loco was evidenced by FL, in this case there was presence of physical evidence but were distorted. It brings unreliability of physical evidence. Also to have physical evidence from criminals is a difficult task, it is not volunteered by criminals while in case of FL it is completely opposite. In FL working of the human mind works as a catalyst.

In FL language is prominent, and it is very much necessary to know the normal, natural and system of rules of language and sentences. There are languages like Urdu, Hindi which use the object before the verb while in English there is the object after the verb. Use of FL helps to profile suspects without seeing it through its accents, anatomy of language, speaking skills etc.

Forensic Linguistics do threat assessment, they decode identities, look at deceptions, trademark infringement, 911 emergency, secret codes/ linguistics cryptography are the situations or cases they look after. FL is not about reading minds.

The Major case, Unabomber, which is a pioneer of FL. It is the most expensive case spanning 17 -18 years. There are various methods used by Forensic Linguistics and in this case the FBI used Document analysis method. In this case the FBI compared 14 Docs of Unabomber and 178 Docs by his family. Unabomber’s own handwriting tracked him down to his arrest. Unabomber was compassionate in his childhood but his life experience, loneliness and isolations brought an apocalyptic vision. Also in Stacy Caster’s case Documentation analysis method was helpful to understand the deception By Stacy after murdering her own step daughter.

Forensic Linguistics is highly dependent on language, voice, words, written data etc. It is necessary to detect the behavior of a suspect from their voice. There are two types of stress in voice in FL investigation. Psychological stress, it is what reflects the sort of psychological state of human beings. To analyze an individual's behavior under stress it is necessary to know how it behaves when he/ she is not stressed. Another is linguistic stress. The challenges faced in finding out the stress is that it is often difficult to obtain exact recorded speech when the speaker is actually stressed and even if one gets a sample it's difficult to gauge the exact intensity of psychological stress.

The speech correlates stress through changing voice intensity. Our fundamental frequency is F0 and it is raised when emotions like fear or anger or stress are felt. E.g. Anger is reflected by rapid speaking. Linguistics is an indicator of false confessions also. Deceptive speech might have suppressed/ elaborated subjectives, repetitive patterns in recalling details could be false confession. The influence of anxiety and grammatical categories are the markers of lying. But it is very much necessary to know, understand and read the voice of suspects, to know their mental state. The reading says that a depressed person uses the most negative words. It's necessary to look at the mental state of the suspect and read his voice to get the truth.

Deception means the message distortion or omission of information. An intended to foster an understanding in another person which the deceiver considers to be false is deception. Linguistic tools for deception include two types of interviews- accusatory interview and investigative interview. Accusatory interview includes answer in yes/no condition and investigative interview has open ended questions. Person can deceive in conditions like stress, cognitive load, and emotional arousal. In deceptive behavior, fundamental frequency increases, intensity increases, speak rate decreases, pause increases, voice has creakiness and breathiness. When a person is in deceptive behavior, he tries to be normal which results in hiccups in between the speech.

Person has an unconscious and conscious mind. Psycholinguistics of forensic linguistics states that the psychology of a person can be known by the way s/he writes. The frequent use of punctuation marks, number of words in a sentence, conscious and unconscious language used can help to know the person’s mind. 911 Emergency calls have a small set of data which helps to know what’s going on in a person's mind. Questions asked by the caller are of- what is called about, theme of call, and how the call was made. If a person on call talks about saving himself or herself, it means s/he is guilty. And if the call is around the victim rather than themselves, it means s/he is innocent. There is variation in language from segment to sentence, speech features of individuals vary from situation to situation variations are systematic and non-systematic. There is no such thing as free or random variations. Systematic variations talk about sociolect form of language whereas unsystematic variation talks about idiolect variation.

The example of racial profiling is case of Clifford v. Kentucky. Social categories profiling includes the case of Stacy Castor. Multilingual mind includes language activation, language matching, language switching, language processing, and language comprehension.

Linguistic stylometric in authorship is a field where we can do profiling of a person based on styles used by that person. Authorship analysis includes identification, verification and profiling of authors. Stylometric (styles + measurements) analysis is called “linguistic fingerprints”. These styles are a reflection of habits. Text can be written and digital. In digital text, factors analyzed are bold, italic, use of abbreviations, spelling, number and symbols. Features of stylometric are line quality, word and letter spacing, size of letters, connecting strokes, slant in letter etc. Factors affecting handwriting are mood, age, time, instrument, illness, drugs and drink. Case of Mahant Narendra Giri is best example where linguist has tried to prove a point that it can be murder. The suicide note was of four pages which is against the fact that a person in stress can not write more than 300-400 words. The way suicide note was written was not in a way that an illiterate person writes.

Not only the style of writing but also the words written can help in victim and criminal profiling. Violent words written in a letter helped to know the intention of murderer in mass murder cases of Seung Hui Cho and Jiverly Wong. Manifests of both the murderer on analysis told about the sentiments of that persons. Cho was very negative and Wong was positive to some extent. Some more cases of master receptors are Sheila Eddy and Ted Bundy. Shiela with her another friend killed her third friend. And on asking the reason she said, “we didn't like her”.

Ted Bundy had kidnapped and killed more than 30 girls.

Forensics phonetics is identifying criminals based on speech and voice analysis. Every person has a different voice based on pitch, vibrations, and vocal folds. Anatomical factors, physiological factors and environmental factors play a major role for uniqueness of voice. Tape authentication done in JNU video clips, signal analysis in the case of gunshots, speech decoding by use of different filters and auditory illusion, speaker profiling and identification are the works that forensic phonetics deals with. Monolingual courts of the USA have 4 varieties- formal, standard English, colloquial English, and subcultural variations.

Thus, forensic linguistics is a wide field with various applications. It needs lots and lots of data and time for solving a case. In Indian courts also, the evidence is not given priority as in the USA and UK. Nowadays, AI is used for investigation which can give us results faster and better.

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