Forensic linguistics has become an often used method of profiling and solving crimes on TV, well known in multiple series, from Criminal Minds to How to Get Away with Murder or American Crime Story. However, the real discipline behind this somewhat sensationalist approach is indeed often used to solve serious crimes. It analyzes language in a law context, for example as evidence or in legal discourse, from establishing authorship of anonymous letters or hate mail to discovering the persons responsible for terrorist threats or establishing the authenticity of documents, from wills to texts or emails. It draws upon multiple other linguistic approaches such as sociolinguistics (e.g. establishing genre, register, style, gender or power relationships), corpus linguistics (using online databases), discourse analysis and pragmatics (investigating conversation organisation, humor, paralanguage or idiosyncratic language features) as well as diachronic linguistics, lexicology, graphology and cryptolinguistics. It is a highly interesting career option for students of linguistics who want to work in an applied legal field. The seminar will provide a general introduction to the discipline and look at key issues and applications. Participants will select a research focus and investigate forensic linguistic questions with the help of applied examples and discuss issues related to forensic case work. For detailed course requirements please consult the respective module descriptions.
Lecturer contact: s.diemer@mx.uni-saarland.de.
- DozentIn: Stefan Diemer