Course Description
This course in forensic linguistics has an interdisciplinary focus–on the intersection of linguistic analysis and the realities of criminal defense, police work, court procedures, intelligence analysis, and the US Constitution, with special emphasis on social justice. Forensic linguistics applies linguistic theory, research and methodology to issues of the law. Forensic linguistics augments investigative and legal analysis by applying rigorous principles of language analysis to linguistic evidence, and thus seeks to help further the cause of justice, whether consulting for the defense or for the prosecution.
We draw on well-established linguistic theories and analytical tools, including variationist sociolinguistics, functionalist semantics, pragmatic inference, schemata, the cooperative principle, speech events, conversational strategies, topic management and support, narrative construction and speech acts.
As well as being introduced to theory and methodology relevant for forensic linguistics, students will replicate analyses of real-world criminal, civil, and intelligence cases in which language itself was crucial evidence. These cases are all cases on which the two instructors consulted, and involve: false confessions and coercive interrogations, linguistic concepts in trademark cases such as Apple v. Microsoft, death threat and suicide letters, authorship analyses in murder cases, and language crimes – such as bribery, extortion, perjury, solicitation to murder.
Students are also introduced to the Forensic Linguistics Capital Case Innocence Project. Through this project linguistics interns, both graduate and undergraduate, work with law students towards a reanalysis of language evidence that caused life imprisonment or placed people on death row.
Warning: some case studies contain very strong language, themes, and distressing, violent, and gruesome details of crimes and pathological motivations that will not be possible for students to avoid seeing, hearing, or analyzing.
Area tags: Forensic Linguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Studies, Dialects
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday 1:30-2:50
Location: ILC N101
Instructors: Robert Leonard & Tanya Christensen
Prof. Robert Leonard directs the Hofstra University Graduate Program in Linguistics: Forensic Linguistics, and the Forensic Linguistics Innocence Project, where integrated teams of faculty and students reanalyze capital cases in which language evidence played a crucial role in a defendant’s conviction and sentence of death. Trained at Columbia in variationist sociolinguistics and semantics, Leonard uses linguistics in investigations and court cases, working with the FBI BAU, UK’s Secret Intelligence Service and MI5, Apple, Facebook, the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force and the Prime Minister of Canada. The New Yorker calls Leonard “[O]ne of the foremost language detectives in the country.”
Dr. Tanya Karoli Christensen, Professor at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, teaches functional grammar, linguistic theory, and forensic linguistics on the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research focuses on syntactic variation, expressions of modality and vagueness, as well as the language and genre of threats and hate speech, on which she runs a multinational, multilingual think tank. She recently completed the construction of a corpus of linguistically annotated threatening messages in Danish. An expert witness in cases on authorship, discourse analysis and linguistic-demographic profiling, she co-teaches with Dr. Leonard on Hofstra University’s fall intensive weeklong course on forensic linguistics.
Dr. Christensen will co-teach during Session 2.