 Welcome. This e-lecture introduces you to the central principles of forensic linguistics, that is, to the application of linguistic techniques to investigate crimes in which language data forms part of the evidence in order to support police statements. In the past, law had received attention from anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists, but since the 1980s linguists also have begun examining such matters as voice identification, where speaker profiles are generated on the basis of their vocal characteristics, and authorship profiling, where authors of textual material can be identified on the basis of their particular textual styles. Consequently, the term forensic linguistics had begun to be used commonly in the 1980s and by now appears to be the established name for this area of study. Let us look at the two central areas in more detail and let's start with voice identification. Now voice identification is also called forensic phonetics and is often distinguished as a separate domain. It has developed over the past 20 years, but with the rapid expansion in the number of cases depending on audio and video recordings in recent years, forensic phonetics now plays a crucial role in an increasing number of criminal trials. Forensic phonetics deals with such matters as speaker profiling, where the goal is to narrow the field of suspects. This includes speaker sex, speakers age, speakers linguistic, regional and social background, speakers, individual peculiarities, and so on and so forth. The second big issue is speaker identification, which is carried out by combining auditory and acoustic analyses. The goal is to provide an opinion as to whether a particular voice, for example in a recorded telephone call, or participating in a conversation recorded by a recording device, whether such a voice is that of a particular known person. Well, and then there are straightforward technical issues. For example, quality enhancement. That is the decoding of disputed utterances. Criminal recordings usually have a very poor quality, often very noisy. Therefore, there is often ample scope for a defendant to challenge the prosecution's version of what was actually said in the course of a recorded conversation. Forensic phoneticians may be asked to prepare a report on the quality of the recording and the intelligibility of the speech. They may also be asked to convert recordings or speech against noise. For example, traffic noise to establish identity of a word or phrase and to prepare an objective transcript of the recording. Occasionally, a defendant may have cause to question whether an audio recording has been tampered with in some way. A phonetician may be needed for authentication. That is, he has to give an opinion on the linguistic evidence in the form of unnatural changes in rhythm, tempo or intonation. And then there are the so-called voice lineups where the identification of a voice itself is often carried out by means of lining up several speakers. First, the language of the incident is recorded by one or more witnesses and a number of recordings of the incident language are then made by the suspects and other persons of the same gender. Similar age, similar class, similar educational and dialect background and crucially with a similar type of voice to the suspect. For example, a creaky voice or a breathy voice or something like that. These recordings will be played to the witnesses to state whether they can identify any of the voices as that of the perpetrator. Let us now move on to author profiling, also called forensic stylistics, where we want to determine who wrote a particular text by comparing it to known writing samples of a suspect. But let us look at such forensic texts first. Law enforcement agencies process hundreds of these every year, often calling on the expertise of psychologists to provide what they call a psychological profile of the person who sent the message. Recently, linguists are also often called to add the dimension of linguistic profiling to their analysis. And if a text is somehow implicated in a legal or criminal context, then it is referred to as a forensic text. A parking ticket could become a forensic text, a will, a letter, a book, an essay, a contract, a health department letter, a thesis, almost anything. In practice, however, forensic linguists have mostly concentrated their attention to a small number of text types, for example, to emergency calls, whose most important feature is probably urgency. Even though it is not always easy to tell the difference between genuine and malicious calls, there are typical features such as the attitude of the speaker towards the incident and specific phonetic characteristics involved in the call. Another forensic text type is referred to as ransom demands or threat texts. They can be spoken or written or even videoed and have in common that the sender of the text or the person making the call is usually anonymous. Or take hate mails, whose goal is to express hatred by appearing to threaten someone. However, there is often no actual threat in reality. The person making the threat is rarely in a position to carry it out. Finally, there are suicide letters, where a central problem is, did the author really kill himself? Or could it be that he is the murderer? In all these texts, there are linguistic features that can provide evidence concerning the authorship of a particular written document. There are two central linguistic parameters that are applied here. The first involves the lexis, that is the vocabulary of a forensic text, and the second is the grammar. And then we have, of course, the orthography, in particular the punctuation, which often provides us with important clues as far as the authorship of a text is concerned. This kind of linguistic profiling has been most effectively used to narrow down a suspect list, rather than to positively identify a suspect. Let us look at grammar and lexis first, using some selected forensic texts. Any peculiarities in the grammatical structure, or in the lexis, that is the vocabulary of a forensic text, can be strong identifiers and give a clue to identify the author. Sometimes, these peculiar uses of grammar and vocabulary are non-standard usages, and they may come from a limited proficiency in either the register or the language that a person is using. Here are two examples. The first is a suicide letter, where we see a fraction over here. In order to find out who the author is, that is, was it a real suicide or a murder, a comparative method can be applied, comparing, for example in this case, the husband's and the wife's writing. There are normally a range of features that can be found in the man's writing and the disputed letter, but not in the woman's writing. For example, misspellings or missions, such as third-person singular s, past tense forms, or wrong categorical choices, such as been instead of being, and so on and so forth. Or take a ransom letter. There was this notorious Australian kidnapping case. Forensic linguists determined that the ransom letter, which was masqueraded as coming from an Asian gang, had probably been written by a native speaker of English on the basis of the use of low-frequency elaborate vocabulary and complex grammatical patterns. Or take the famous Lindberg ransom note, which was written in the 1930s, which is of course full of errors and does not mention any intention of returning the hostage, neither alive nor dead. Not only grammar and vocabulary, as in these two cases, but also peculiarities of punctuation can be important identifiers. Here are some examples. Many forensic texts, for example, use commas and not full stops in particular cases. So here the two sentences are not kept apart by a full stop. Or take the case of superfluous punctuation, where sometimes a full stop and a comma are used in succession, and this may be repeated in particular forensic texts. Or we can observe the failure to use any punctuation between two discrete sentences as over here, where we have two sentences, but they're not separated at all. And in forensic texts, you also find what is referred to as supernumeric punctuation, where lists contain commas between all items, such as in this case, over here. Okay, so much for now. I hope I could point out the central ideas of forensic linguistics, that is, the application of linguistic techniques to investigate crimes in which language data plays an important role. We saw that phonetics provides us with the methods of investigating speech data and improving it for further examination and that the analysis of grammatical, lexical and orthographical features can provide us with important clues about the authorship of written texts. We did not cover all details on the basis of particular examples. My suggestion is to do that in class or in online practicals on the basis of actual forensic data. Thanks for your attention and see you again soon.