FORENSIC LINGUISTICS: APPLICATIONS
H2000

A case-based approach to solving legal and law enforcement problems through linguistic analysis, focusing on these applications of Forensic Linguistics:

• Demographic Linguistic Profiles: Dialectology, sociolinguistics and linguistic variation analyses indicate a writer's regional and local geographic origin, education level, occupational training, gender, native language and other features discernable from the structure, phrasing, vocabulary, fluency, syntax, phonological representation, etc., of the critical communication.
• Authorship Analysis: Who is the possible author? Investigation and litigation support of identification conclusions. Identification of anonymous authors.
• Threat Level Analysis: State-of-the-art techniques, based on thousands of FBI cases, assess the probability of harm. When a threat is made, how should it be responded to? How likely is the threat to be carried out? How can the author be found? What are the overlaps between Threat Assessment and Forensic Linguistics?

The course introduces sociolinguistic variation as a crucial theoretical component of analysis and elucidates, through lecture, case study, and workshop, forensic linguistic responses to:

• Terror: Domestic and foreign terror campaigns
• Threat Assessment: Threats to government, officials, workplace, schools, and private individuals
• Criminal Communications: Extortion, ransom notes, criminal intelligence disinformation, intercepted communications

This course will serve as a general overview of the field of Forensic Linguistics. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to assess which cases are appropriate for forensic linguistic analysis, explain the tools linguistics can bring to an investigation, and have learned through the workshops the principles of applying these tools to data from actual cases.