Approaching A Forensic Text

Approaching a forensic text

discourse and text analytic tools for forensic contexts
In approaching a text in a forensic context, the analyst needs to consider how it is similar and
what distinguishes it from other texts in other contexts and which theories and methods are most
appropriate to analyses it.
We can deal with written as well as spoken evidence. If we want to analyze a spoken or recorded
evidence then one method to analyses it completely could be converting it to written script. Written
transcripts of recordings of spoken interaction, text will be used to refer to both the written and the
spoken.
Spoken discourse includes cooperation between participants, politeness and the rules for turn-
taking: turn design, allocation, distribution and function. Although each speaker gets the same number of
turns, turn length is distinctive, with the witness often responding only minimally with yes, no or hmm to
quite long sequences of lawyer-led request-for-confirmation moves. Power, control and status are
unequally distributed too, producing an asymmetrical relationship between lawyers and witnesses that is
oriented to and understood by participants in the courtroom.
When asked a general question about the essential differences between speech and writing,
people sometimes observe that writing is highly structured and that speech is unstructured. In
conversation we talk of openings and closings, whereas in writing we talk of introductions and
conclusions. We would not expect an essay or a book to conclude with I’m afraid I’ve got to go now or
Ok see you tomorrow then, nor would we normally close a telephone conversation with The End or in
conclusion. If we did, we would be marking or foregrounding the manner of production, and the
interlocutor or audience would draw inferences from this rule-breaking.
Institutional interaction is typically asymmetrical, since power and control are located in the
institutional participant, rather than being equally distributed. This results in the institutional speaker
directing and controlling the discourse rather than the lay speaker and institutional transactive goals being
pursued at the expense of social or phatic ones.
Institutional talk is characterized by Drew and Heritage (1992: 22) as having:
 an orientation to core goals, tasks or identity conventionally associated with the institution – ‘goal
orientations’;
 constraints on ‘allowable contributions’;
 specific ‘inferential frameworks’ in the context (Levinson 1979: 72 refers to these as ‘inferential
schemata’).
This means that the institutional members of legal conversations are in control of the legal goals and
agendas in talk and are aware of the constraints on the meaning of particular words or phrases, such as
intend or admit, whereas lay members do not understand the talk in the same way and could be described
as being at the mercy of these goals.
The asymmetrical relationship does not always mean that the institutional member is always powerful
in a negatively constraining way. For example, in a courtroom the lawyer, when questioning a witness
called for his own side or party, uses his powerful position and linguistic skills to support the witness’s
testimony, designing his turns to help her present her case in the best way.
Text and talk in forensic settings are done differently from social talk. A legal conversation takes
place in both a physical and an interactive context, one which constrains social evaluation – we do not
expect institutional speakers in legal contexts to evaluate stories with interjections like ‘Oh my God’ or
‘You don’t say’ – and instead produces no reaction or a legal evaluation – ‘Did you intend to injure
him?’. Lay speakers collaborate in this institutional work by making their stories factual.

Text Analysis
There are many contrastive points that can be made here. Keep these points in your mind while
analyzing a text.

 Schemas:
A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Schemas
can be useful because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is
available in our environment.
However, these mental frameworks also cause us to exclude pertinent information to focus instead
only on things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs and ideas. Schemas can contribute to stereotypes and
make it difficult to retain new information that does not conform to our established ideas about the world.
This is a powerful set of concepts for analyzing the interpretative processes that are activated when
audiences respond to speakers and to drama in particular. It also takes us one step further in our
consideration of how real courtroom interactions are encountered by an audience in a similar way. In
open court the interaction is ‘played’ to a public audience and then, through journalistic reporting,
transmitted to a wider public audience.
Participants in court are to greater and lesser degrees aware of this wider audience, but are
nonetheless aware of the more immediate audience and their presentation to them. There is therefore a
degree of staging and drama even in the non-dramatic text.

 Quantitative Observations:
We can compare the texts statistically in terms of the number of words uttered by each speaker over a
comparable number of turns. This is useful in analyzing the proportion of talk allotted to each speaker and
the length of turns. We can also take a look on difference in terms of the amount of talk.

 Qualitative Comments on Quantitative Data:

Differences in length of turn are only partially due to the status of the speaker. This underlines a point
made by Hoffer (2005: 101) that the extended turns of complainants, defendants and lay witnesses are
usually narrative in content, whereas those of police and expert witnesses are predominantly non-
narrative. This fact illustrates the difference between the two kinds of witnesses: those who are there to
tell their story as eye-witnesses who have experienced the event or as an integral part of it and those who
are there to explain procedural, scientific, or, in the case of the Hutton Inquiry, political details
surrounding the event.
  The Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims:
The cooperative principle is a principle of conversation that was proposed by Grice 1975, stating that
participants expect that each will make a
“conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange.”
The Gricean Maxims are a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood
from them. The Maxims are based on his cooperative principle, which states,
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged,”
and is so called because listeners and speakers must speak cooperatively and mutually accept one another
to be understood in a particular way. The principle describes how effective communication in
conversation is achieved in common social situations and is further broken down into the four Maxims of
Quality, Quantity, Relevance and Manner.
 Maxim of Quality: Be truthful
 Maxim of Quantity: Quantity of Information
 Maxim of Relation: Relevance
 Maxim of Manner: Be Clear
So, in a text we also analyze these maxims in order to interpret text in a better way.

 Speech Acts:
A speech act in philosophy of language and linguistics is something expressed by an individual that
not only presents information, but performs an action as well. A speech act is an utterance that serves a
function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request,
complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal.
In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude,
and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For
example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret.
As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the
speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed.
 Types of Speech Acts:
There are various kinds of speech acts, yet the following, classified by John Searle, have received
particular attention:
Representatives: commit a speaker to the truth of an expressed proposition.
 Paradigm cases: asserting, stating, concluding, boasting, describing, suggesting.
o I am a great singer.

o Bill was an accountant.

 Commissive: commit a speaker to some future action.
 Paradigm cases: promising, pledging, threatening, vowing, offering.
o I am going to leave you.

o I'll call you tonight.

Directives: are used by a speaker who attempts to get the addressee to carry out an action.
 Paradigm cases: requesting, advising, commanding, challenging, inviting, daring, entreating.
o You'd better tidy up that mess.

o Sit down.

Declarations: affect an immediate change of affairs.

 Paradigm cases: declaring, baptizing, resigning, firing from employment, hiring, arresting.
o We find the defendant guilty.

o I resign.

Expressives: express some sort of psychological state.

 Paradigm cases: greeting, thanking, apologizing, complaining, congratulating.
o This beer is disgusting.

o I'm sorry to hear that.

 Face Threatening Acts:

This behavior violates the interactional norms of the courtroom. In real courtrooms, when questioning
witnesses, many of the lawyer’s turns are ‘face threatening acts’, which challenge the witness. In this way
the lawyer’s role in the courtroom (particularly in cross-examination) allows him to interfere with and put
pressure on the witness in pursuance of the interactional goals of the Crown or State, by whom he is given
his power.

 Turn-Taking, Preference and Interruption:

By contrasting the real and fictional texts we can see how turn-taking operates normally and where
deviation from norms occurs. The notion of ‘projectability’ is an important one in conversational analysis.
Because speakers understand that turns are constructed in terms of units that are predicted by the previous
one – yes/ no question expects a yes or no answer; information-seeking question requires an informative
answer – we are able to predict their possible completion at transition relevance places (TRPs), which are
indicated by such things as a change in the pitch or volume of the voice, the end of a syntactic unit,
nomination, silence or body language.
Turns to talk are allocated by means of three ordered options:
 the current speaker selects the next
 a listener self selects
 speaker continuation.
This is a powerful distributional device and an important structuring feature of talk.
‘Preference’ too is an important principle. Conversation analysts note that talk is organized by
means of structural pairs: question with answer, invitation with acceptance or rejection, into which
speakers build preference for particular responses. For example, in the case of yes/no questions the
preference is for an affirmative or negative response.
Sacks et al. (1974: 700) noted a number of ‘grossly apparent’ or obvious facts about conversation
which are useful to consider here:
 Only one participant speaks at a time – overlap, when it occurs, is brief.
 Order and distribution are not determined in advance and vary within and between
conversations.
 Size of turn varies: different sized units – word, phrase, clause; speaker continuation
allows speakers to say more.
 What is said or done is not determined in advance. There is local management (within
social and institutional norms). Speaker change recurs.

The Language of The Law

 Introduction:
Anyone who hears the term ‘legal language’ thinks immediately of grammatically complex, sparsely
punctuated, over-lexicalized, opaque written text. Is the characterization accurate and, if so, how did it
come to be so? Tiersma (2001: 75) notes that in Anglo-Saxon times legal language was entirely oral, with
written text, when it eventually came to be used, serving at first only as a record of what had already been
performed orally:
What mattered was what was said by the participants, not what was written by a scribe. The written
documents were merely evidentiary of the oral ceremony, rather than operative or dispositive legal
documents in the modern sense.
Even in the area of legislation, the written text was originally primarily a report of what had been
said. The current situation, under what lawyers call the plain meaning rule, is that:
unless there is an ambiguity obvious from the text itself, anything that the legislature said or did
outside of the text itself cannot be used to interpret it.
Because the crucial period for the textualizing of the law was during the period when the king and the
nobility standardly spoke French, legal language still displays significant French influences. At first,
French was the language of the courts, though from very early on there were concessions to the fact that
the language of the majority of the population was English. One surviving lexico-grammatical
consequence of the two languages working side by side is the frequent use of binomials; that is, pairs of
originally synonymous words taken from the two languages like devise and bequeath, breaking and
entering, acknowledge and confess, null and void. Indeed, binomials are up to five times more frequent in
English legal language than in most other prose genres.
Gradually, the English language drove out the French and by the sixteenth century the number of
French legal terms in active use had shrunk to under a thousand.
 Legal Style and Register
Legal language has a reputation for archaisms and convoluted syntax, but as Halliday (1994)
points out language is the way it is because of what it has to do. This is nowhere truer than in legal
settings.
Ritual openings of encounters such as the reading of the police caution or the Miranda Warnings
at the beginning of an interview, or the reading of the indictment at a court hearing, use formulaic
expressions, which signal the start of a formal legal process. On the one hand we can argue that such
language is difficult to understand and therefore distances and disadvantages the lay participant, but an
alternative functional perspective is that the formulaic formality is part of the way the participants orient
to what is going on. It is a signal that a formal ‘high stakes’ activity is starting. Understanding legal style
is therefore one of the many interpretative skills that needs to be acquired in order to make sense of legal
texts.
An analysis of the style of legal statutes reveals consistently used linguistic forms and syntactic
features that contribute to characterizing the genre. These include:

 The already mentioned binomial expressions.

 Complex prepositions
 And long, complex, multi-clause sentences with syntactic matching in the subordinate
clauses
 Grammatical Words in Legal Contracts:
In legal contracts the choice and frequency of particular grammatical and lexical items is distinctive.
One of the ways in which we can answer the question of which words are legal words, or which words are
used differently in legal texts, is to look at frequency lists across collections or corpora of texts selected
from different genres.
A study of the two corpora reveals marked differences. First, compare the ten most frequent words in
the two corpora:
BNC: the, of, and, a, in, to (infinitive), it, is, was, to (preposition)
COMET contracts: the, of, or, and, to (preposition), in, any, to (infinitive), shall, be.
One of the interesting things about frequency lists is that it is differences between grammatical words
that strike us first, since they are the most frequent items in all texts and usually account for nearly half of
all the tokens. When we look at a legal text, though, we often pass over the grammatical items, unless
they are especially distinctive (for example, complex prepositions), and focus on features of syntax or
archaic lexical items in an attempt to isolate what is distinctively legal in character. In the group of the ten
most frequent grammatical words in contracts, the distinctive ones are: ‘or’, ‘any’, ‘shall’ and ‘be’. Also,
of note is that the preposition ‘to’ is more frequent than the infinitive ‘to’ and the preposition ‘by’ comes
in eleventh place in COMET. By comparison, in the BNC frequency list these words occur in the
following frequency places:
or = 32; any = 84; shall = not even in top 140; be = 15; by = 19.

 Interpreting Legal Words:

 Potentially ambiguous constructions can cause all kinds of problems in the interpretation of statutes.
For this reason, lawyers have interpretive rules, derived from past struggles with texts, which they then
apply to new and previously uninterpreted texts.
For instance, the last antecedent rule states that the scope of a limiting clause has to be restricted to
the immediately preceding antecedent, ‘unless the context or evident meaning requires a different
construction’.
Here are the basic facts. A Mrs. Anderson met a Mr. Larson at a county fair and they decided to go
off to a restaurant in Mr. Larson’s car. After spending several hours in the restaurant Mr. Larson said he
was going to the toilet, but he never came back. After waiting for some considerable time, Mrs. Anderson
left the restaurant and drove off in what she thought was Mr. Larson’s car. In fact, it was not and what
was worse she had an accident. Her insurance company denied liability for the damage she had caused to
the ‘borrowed’ car, and justified this by referring to the following part of her car insurance policy:
Such insurance as is afforded by this policy … with respect to the owned automobile applies to the
use of a non-owned automobile by the named insured … and any other person or organization legally
responsible for use by the named insured … of an automobile not owned or hired by such other person
or organization provided such use is with the permission of the owner or person in lawful possession of
such automobile.
At first reading the insurance company’s interpretation seems quite clearly correct – Mrs. Anderson,
‘the named insured’, was certainly allowed to drive cars belonging to others, as indeed was ‘any other
person [for whom she was] legally responsible’, but only provided the owner had given permission – and
in this case there was no dispute that no permission had been given – indeed the owner did not even know
her, let alone that she was in his car at the time of the accident. However, Mrs. Anderson’s lawyers
argued for another, more favorable, interpretation of the policy as a result of applying the last antecedent
rule. They argued that the correct interpretation of the text was that the requirement with the permission
of the owner only applied to the immediately preceding any other person or organization and not to the
named insured, who was therefore properly insured to drive the automobile. The court accepted their
argument.
In this case the court did not apply the last antecedent rule, but found another rule which read:
When a clause follows several words in a statute and is applicable as much to the first word as to
the others in the list, the clause should be applied to all of the words which preceded it.

 Lexical words in legal contracts:

Let us now return to the language of contracts. We find that it is not just their grammatical vocabulary
that displays distinctively different frequencies by comparison with a general corpus – the distribution of
lexical items is different too.
Legal English lexicon differs to a great extent from ordinary one. No doubt that such vocabulary does
not render legal language clearer, but unfortunately tougher, hard to understand without a considerable
familiarity with the legal sphere. 

Ordinary and Special Meanings

The vocabulary used in a legal text will look very much like that of ordinary English and most of the
time the words will have ordinary language meanings. However, a small number of the words in any
given legal document will have a legal definition, which dictates how an otherwise ordinary language
item must be interpreted in the particular contexts to which the document applies. Sometimes the
‘defined’ word appears in bold, sometimes it is spelled with an initial capital, both conventions being used
to indicate that it is, at that point, being used in its defined meaning. For example, one early road traffic
act re-defined ‘carriage’ to include ‘bicycle’, while another had to define ‘dusk’ in order to be able to
forbid people to remain in public parks after dusk.
Since English is a world language in former colonies of the British Empire, the legacy of specialized
meaning is a worldwide one.

On Applying the Law

Texts such as statutes, and talk in legal settings, are the way they are because they are situated in a
multidimensional, real-world context that produces complex and dynamic textual and intertextual forces.
These forces constrain and determine the nature, meaning and effects of those texts on individuals.
We cannot simply interpret laws and statutes as texts, but rather need to consider their use in context.
Taking the trial as an example, a defendant faces a charge, such as murder, which is read out by the Clerk
of the Court as an indictment.
At the heart of this process is the particular law or statute that specifies an offence, but the way that
the statute is understood and applied is specific to each case and set of circumstances. The judicial process
is influenced by a whole range of prior texts and contexts both written and spoken, all of which center on
the law.
 Legal Genres

‘Genre’ can be defined simply: conventional, repeated and distinctive features of text that arise from its
communicative purpose. Another way is to say that a text is an example of a particular genre. We are all
familiar with the major fictional genres and their structures and interpretation. We can readily name them:
novel, play, poem, film, and also their subgenres, such as horror film, romantic comedy or science fiction,
and we know that in a romantic comedy a boy will meet a girl, fall in and out of love, struggle against
obstacles placed in the path of true love, but we also know that everything will get sorted out in the end.
However, when it comes to professional and spoken genres, naming and definition is much more difficult.
So, although genres are stable entities, that are repeated and understood through conventions and
regularities that are consistent across texts, they do not occur in identical form in each textual realization.
In the early stages of writing scientific reports we may not have realized why we were writing down
information under headings such as equipment, method and results; we had to learn the role each of these
sections plays in the whole job of communicating the purpose and nature of the experiment and the
results. We learned that while a list might be appropriate in the equipment section, a sequence of
declarative sentences with past tense verbs in logical steps is the typical way of constructing the method
section. Genres are therefore domain specific; they have lexico-grammatical features associated with
them; they have specific stages, often named and usually sequenced that contribute to a structural whole;
while each stage has a purpose in the text as a whole, some of them may be optional, as, for example,
diagrams and pictures in the scientific report genre.
Martin (1992) describes some fictional and factual macro-genres that exist in society: report, procedure,
exposition, narrative, recount, but Gibbons also points out that in texts ‘deeper’ genre patterns
‘may underlie more formalized and rigid “surface” genres that are used for specific social purposes’.
Gibbons talks about the police interview genre as having a number of stages, and notes that the genre has
within it an ‘underlying narrative structure’, while Hoffer makes a distinction between three phases of the
trial and the principal genres found there: procedural genres such as jury selection, the calling and
swearing-in of witnesses; adversarial genres such as opening statements, witness examinations, closing
argument and adjudicative genres such as a judge’s summation and sentencing.
Generic knowledge is knowledge of what texts and their constituents do, or, it, knowledge that involves
the use of ‘interpretive frameworks’. Lawyers were able to activate this knowledge to gloss this
‘incomprehensible’ clause and explain that it ‘is inserted at the beginning of many such contracts to cover
the contingencies of the parties moving to another state where the law is different’.
Familiarity with these genres is therefore an advantage to professional speakers and forensic analysts, as:
Knowledge that makes sense of the text … includes, in addition to textual knowledge, the awareness
and understanding of the shared practices of professional and discourse communities (Swales 1990)
and their choice of genres in order to perform their everyday tasks.

 Legal contexts:
The study of context is vital to the understanding and interpretation of legal texts and forensic linguistic
analysis. It is the focus of renewed and recent research among anthropologists and linguists as well as
having a history in the twentieth century, particularly in Hymes’ (1974) ‘speech situation’, ‘social
situation’, ‘contextualization cues’, ‘context of situation’.
Hymes’ (1972) notion of the speech community, a ‘community sharing rules for the conduct and
interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety’ is important,
because these rules and norms generate some of the distinctive ways of speaking: the register generic
features of openings and closings, norms for interruption and politeness and so on.

 Context – interviewing and the courtroom:

Imagine a bare room containing simply four seated participants and audio tape recording equipment. This
is the environmental context for a standard British police interview. There will normally be two police
officers, one an interviewer, the other a note-taker, and a witness or suspect, who may have an
accompanying solicitor, parent or social worker. This constitutes Gibbons’ primary reality, but it also
implies other realities that are equally and sometimes even more important. These other realities can be
illustrated with an extract from the early part of a police interview with a male suspected of stabbing his
girlfriend during an argument.
Apart from the primary reality of the interview room, there is also the secondary reality, the event that is
being talked about, that is the argument and subsequent fight that have resulted in his arrest. The
transitions between these two realities are indicated by shifts in tense: the interview is in the present tense
and the story in the past.
Police interviews are goal-focused, frequently having an end-product: a statement and a future use in
court. The norms that govern interviews are related to the genres that they contain: interrogation and
storytelling, but interviewing involves ‘multiple tasks’ and ‘multiple goals’, tasks such as ‘telling,
listening, writing, formulating, analyzing’ and goals such as ‘the extraction, communication and use of
emotional and factual information’.

 Conclusion:
Legal genres, their styles and modes of interaction and the social practices, roles and participant
relationships that they produce, constitute complex inter- relationships between text and context. Legal
genres are the way they are because of the communicative practices that they employ and the functions
that they serve in legal and world contexts. Police statements and courtroom discourse are rich in spatial
and temporal expressions, because of the work they do in situating the talk. If we want to fully account
for what the language is doing or what the speaker is doing through use of language, we have to take
account of the context of use and the linguistic choices that are made.