特别报道：第七届国际法律语言学大会在英国召开
第七届国际法律语言学大会论文摘要
（一）
Conference
Abstracts
Michelle Aldridge and June Luchjenbroers
Cardiff University and University of Wales,Bangor
Questions,Metaphors &Frames:Methods of manipulation,
and subsequent analysis
Allan Bell
Auckland University of Technology
Assessing the professionalism of a television news presenter
Susan Berk-Seligson
Vanderbilt University
False confession:linguistic and extralinguistic evidence of
coercion in a police interrogation
Sue Blackwell,Jess Shapero and Willem Meijs
University of Birmingham
Texts
of Murder and Martyrdom
On
2nd November 2004,the Netherlands was shocked by the murder of
the controversial journalist Theo van Gogh.He had been both shot
and stabbed repeatedly,and a knife was left pinning a letter to
his body:a lengthy diatribe addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali,a
Somali-born Dutch MPwho had recently made a film with van Gogh
about domestic violence against Muslim women.The letter informed
Ali that she was next on the killer's hit-list.Afurther letter
was found on the suspect,Mohammed Bouyeri.Like the first it was
written in fluent Dutch,but this text was in verse and described
the writer's expectations of martyrdom.Of the 40%or so of
suicides in Western Europe who leave notes,very few are also
killers.The corollary of this is that very few murderers go on to
kill themselves and leave suicide notes.Typically,suicide notes
are full of affection and,according to some research,have a
positive outlook.This paper confronts a type of suicide which is
different from that usually considered in academic research:the
issue of "intent"is less applicable in these cases and
it seems,anecdotally at least,that most of these suicides do
leave notes.Yet even in cases of suicide bombings in the Middle
East where video testaments are common,texts left at the scene of
the attack are unheard of.The van Gogh texts probably constitute
the first example of an attacker documenting in a European
language their expectations of both killing and dying in an
intended martyrdom operation.This paper will analyse the language
of both the "murder note"and the "suicide
note"in this case and will consider questions such as
"How do murder-suicide notes differ from the typical suicide
note?"and "should one expect the language of a suicide
note to be typical of the writer's usual personal style?"
Victor J Boucher
Universitéde Montréal
On
the measurable linguistic correlates of deceit in recounting
passed events
Deceit
has been defined as a deliberate attempt to create by a
communicative act,and without forewarning,a belief that is
untrue or inaccurate.This presentation deals with deceit in a
situation where speakers recount passed events that cannot be
immediately verified.In this context,a number of linguistic
variables can serve to reveal a speaker’s intention to deceive,
thereby establishing the need for investigators to verify
recounted events.Acomprehensive bibliography will be made
available on 41variables that have been proposed.Of these,only
13linguistic variables present acceptable degrees of reliability
and do not require acoustic analyses beyond phonetic
transcription.Considering these variables,an experiment was
performed with the purpose of isolating the specific aspects that
can discriminate deceitful from truthful discourse across speakers
and “themes”.Twenty university students were asked to
recount,in turn,events that took place and that did not take
place in five different places (in a hospital,at school,in a
bar,on vacation,and at work).The recorded speech provided a
corpus of 200three-to-five minute discourses varying in theme,
with half representing truthful and half inaccurate or untrue
accounts.Currently,50%of the recorded samples representing ten
subjects have been transcribed in ASCIIformat using particular
coding.Descriptive statistics were derived by applying routines
of an available freeware program.Paired t-tests for the analysed
samples show significant differences on given variables such as
hesitation,lexical repetition (type/token)and utterance length.
Amultivariate discriminant analysis will be applied to determine
the successfulness of linear combinations of variables in
correctly classifying deceitful discourse.This analysis will also
determine how classification rates vary with individuals and
themes.The discussion will stress the advantage of speech over
written testimony as a means of soliciting variations in the
particular variables that can reveal deceit.
Deborah Bradford and Jane Goodman-Delahunty
University of New South Wales
Truthful
vs.deceptive confessions:Investigating the performance of
statement analysis techniques at detecting deception in the
confessional context
Detection
of deception and the accuracy of credibility assessments is an
important forensic concern.The prevalence of false confessions is
unknown,but detecting false confessions is significant to the
successful functioning of the legal system as false confessions
may lead to false conviction or imprisonment of innocent persons
(Davis &O’Donohue,2003).Whether genuine and deceptive
confessions can be successfully distinguished has received scant
research attention.In the current investigation we examined the
utility of text-based techniques focussing on statement content,
such as the Aberdeen Report Judgment Scales (ARJS)(Sporer,1998)
to distinguish truthful and false confessions.In this study,
participants gave either genuine or deceptive accounts of
autobiographical events according to the real/simulating paradigm
(Ashkar,2002).Participants in the genuine condition gave a
detailed confessional narrative to a second experimenter of an act
they had previously committed.Participants in the deceptive
condition were “simulators”required to adopt a genuine
confession as their own and convince a second experimenter that
they had actually experienced the event.All narratives were
transcribed and subsequently analysed by lay observers and police
officers trained in the application of ARJScriteria.Findings are
discussed in terms of the performance of law enforcement
professionals versus laypersons,the viability of statement
analysis techniques to assess credibility of confession evidence
and the legal implications in the confessional context.
Christian Braun,Silvia Hansen-Schirra,Kerstin Kunz and
Stella Neumann
Saarland University
The
Syntactic Complexity of German Legalese -An Empirical Approach
This
paper presents an empirical analysis of the syntactic complexity
of German legal texts.In order to gain insights into
characteristics of legal language we compare German Federal
Constitutional Court decisions and press releases as well as
newspaper reports on these decisions with respect to a range of
grammatical features.Our main interest is clausal as well as
phrasal complexity.We claim that the court decisions display
features of legal LSP(Language for Special Purposes)which make
them hard to understand.These features are expected to be less
salient in the press releases and to almost disappear in the
newspaper reports.In our analysis of clauses,we process the
above mentioned three corpora using a topological parser.It is
based on the theory-neutral notion of sentence topology
specifically developed for German.The parser structures sentences
into a series of neighbouring and embedded sub-parts,so-called
topological fields.The phrases are analysed manually using an XML
editor.Both the automatic output of the parser and the output of
the manual annotation are double-checked by the annotators.We
interpret syntactic complexity by counting the number of tokens
and phrases per field and analyse nesting on clausal and phrasal
level.This enables us to pinpoint patterns which are unique to
court decisions as compared to press releases as well as newspaper
reports.Since grammatical complexity has a major impact on
comprehensibility,the results of the analysis serve our long-term
goal to develop linguistic strategies for improving the
comprehensibility of legal texts.We expect that a number of
phenomena found in our analysis -e.g.overloaded 'Vorfelds',deep
clausal nesting,heavy phrases -will play an important role in
formulating such strategies.
Ron Butters and Jackson
Nichols
Duke University
What Can
Go Wrong When Linguists Testify in American Trademark Litigation
“Dictionary
definitions”is a legally determinative factor that American courts may
consider in deciding whether a putative trademark is GENERIC(and hence not
legally protectable).Linguists who testify in such cases are permitted to
interpret and expand upon existing dictionary entries,using established
linguistic and lexicographical methodologies.Unfortunately,the role of the
linguist in such cases is more complex and perilous than is commonly
perceived.Our presentation examines how a noted linguist’s apparently
flawed understanding of genericness led to testimony that helped to created a
still-unresolved legal muddle.A Federal District Court (the 6th in 1969)
ruled that opry ‘medley of country music,dance,and comedy routines’was
not generic and hence a legitimate trademark of the Grand Ole Opry (which had
registered the trademark in 1950after having used it for some 22years).
However,another court (the 8th Circuit in 1982)ruled instead that opry is
generic,hence not protectable.The crucial difference in the presentations of
the two cases:in 1982,the attorneys challenging the claims of the Grand Ole
Opry employed a respected linguist and lexicographer,Fred Cassidy,who
testified that opry (a dialectal variation of opera)is "generic"
because it is (indisputably)a term long applied in American folk speech to
various kinds of theatrical performances.Legally,however,this conclusion
seems open to serious question because,as used by the Grand Ole Opry (and in
attempted use by rivals),Opry is far more specialized in meaning than is the
ordinary dialect term opry.As such,it was not,at least at its inception,
the “name of the thing itself”but rather an imaginative semantic
narrowing of the original word.Cassidy’s testimony,apparently a
fundamental underpinning of the 1982ruling,while no doubt given in good
faith,essentially blurred the legal and linguistic issues.
Sophie Cacciaguidi-Fahy
National University of Ireland,Galway
The
‘liaison dangereuse’between individual liability and collective guilt:
interpreting the language of Article 7(1)of the ICTYstatute
Despite the
methodical recognition of individual liability in international criminal law
to avoid the collectivisation of guilt,we continue to assume that crimes
against humanity,such as genocide,express the actions and the implicit guilt
of entire groups of people.The overall purpose of this paper is to
demonstrate how the language of one article of the ICTYstatute has been used
by judicial discourse to construct a peculiar legal doctrine in international
criminal law.Iwill endeavour to do this by analysing the paradoxical
relationship between a collectivist signifier,‘joint criminal
enterprise’,used deliberately to establish the individual nature of a
signified,‘individual liability’in the quest to avoid collective guilt.
Iwill begin my analysis by reflecting on the nature of the joint criminal
enterprise doctrine first enunciated by the ICTYas implicitly deriving from
the language of Article 7(1)of the ICTY Statute.Iwill then reflect on the
teleological interpretation by the Appeal Chamber of the language of article
7(1)to extend the concept of mens rea beyond its established frontiers and
the implications this linguistic/purposive interpretation has had in
redefining the concepts of individual and collective criminal liability.In
conclusion,Iwill attempt to demonstrate that,although joint criminal
enterprise is a sufficiently ambiguous concept to stand as a point solution to
establish individual liability of multiple actors within a group and induce
the necessary ‘stigmatisation’of serious crimes against humanity,from a
legal discourse standpoint,judicial discourse has continued to reason in the
traditional legal framework of liability constructed on ‘simplistic’
notions of responsibility based on the notions of principal or accessory,
using the same rhetoric and language of that traditional model.
Carole Chaski
Institute for Linguistic Evidence,Inc
Alternative
Distance Measures for Validating the Syntactic Analysis Method
Working with
85documents authored by 17American writers,the syntactic analysis method (Chaski
2001,2004)correctly classified at least 90%up to 99.2%of all the documents
in several different experiments.These experiments included multiple-author
classification as well as pair-of-authors classification.Further,the
experiments included author-to-author as well as intra-author document
classification.Finally,the experiments included several alternative distance
measures implemented in SPSS,SAS JMPand Excel.These results demonstrate the
validity of the method as a tool for determining authorship and suggest
standard protocols under which the method optimally operates.
Jordi Cicres and M Teresa Turell
Universitat Pompeu Fabra,Barcelona
Short and
long-term variation in intonation patterns:a preliminary study for speaker
identification
In this study
we examine some preliminary data related to intonation patterns in Catalan as
useful variables for speaker identification.Acorpus of read texts –
recorded in two different sessions with a temporal gap of one year –of 6
Catalan speakers is used.There are many different ways to pronounce a
sentence,depending on pragmatic and discursive uses,such as questions,
statements,exclamations,hesitation,sarcasm etc.In order to achieve these
pragmatic and discursive goals,speakers need to modify several aspects of
their voice,implementing a melodic line (or intonation)in their speech.
Pitch,voice quality,tempo,rhythm and loudness are the phonetic correlates
of intonation (Clark and Yallop 1995;Prieto 2002).In this study,only pitch
is taken into account.The hypothesis tested in this study is that there will
be less intra-speaker than inter-speaker differences in the intonation
patterns of both short and long-term samples.Further research will involve
conducting the same experiment with spontaneous speech.To carry out the
labelling and analysis of the data,the International Transcription System for
Intonation (INTSINT)(Hirst,Di Cristo and Espesser 2000)is used.The
fundamental frequency (F0)contour has been previously stylized by means of
the MOMELalgorithm (Hirst and Espesser 1993).
References:
Clark,J.and Yallop,C.(1995).An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology.
Second edition.Oxford.Blackwell Publishing.
Hirst,D.and Espesser,R.(1993).‘Automatic modelling of fundamental
frequency using a quadratic spline function’.In Travaux de l’Institut de
Phonétique d’Aix 15:71-85.
Prieto,P.(2002).Entonació.Models,teoria,mètodes.Barcelona.Ariel.
Hirst,D.;Di Cristo,A.and Espesser,R.(2000).‘Levels of representation
and levels of analysis for the description of intonation systems’.In Horne,
M.(ed.).Prosody:Theory and Experiment.The Netherlands.Kluwer Academic
Publishers.55-88.
John Conley and Cynthia Williams
University of North Carolina School of Law,Chapel Hill and University of
Illinois
The
Discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility
The corporate social responsibility (“CSR”)movement is one of the most
recent significant developments in corporate law and governance.The
governments of Europe and the United Kingdom have begun to put significant
pressure on corporations to go beyond the narrow pursuit of financial returns
for shareholders and to take into account the interests of a broader class of
“stakeholders”that includes employees,local communities,people of
countries where raw materials are procured,governments,and NGOs.Newly
enacted laws and regulations require companies to consider and report on the
social and environmental risks to which they may be subject.The law is also
encouraging institutional investors such as pension funds to take such risks
into account in evaluating companies for investment.Although the law in the
United States is nowhere near as well developed,many observers of the
international financial scene believe that the trend will soon affect the U.S.
as well.In response to these new legal mandates as well as pressure from
various constituencies,multinational corporations have begun to engage in new
forms of communications,including multi-stakeholder dialogues and expanded
social and environmental disclosure.While these communication processes are a
reaction to heightened social expectations that are being conveyed to
corporate leaders,the companies themselves are controlling the discussion and
debate and thereby shaping the same social expectations they are ostensibly
responding to.It is thus unclear whether these communication strategies will
lead to substantive changes in corporate behavior,or will simply provide safe
(from the corporations point of view)venues for the disaffected to let off
steam.Our paper reports on a project that uses qualitative social science
techniques,including ethnography and discourse analysis,to examine these new
communication processes.We have interviewed people in corporations,NGOs,
socially responsible investing funds,and public relations firms,both in the
U.S.and in the U.K.;have attended major corporate social responsibility
gatherings as ethnographic observers;and have undertaken discourse analyses
of a number of published corporate social responsibility reports.The specific
research question we are addressing include:whether the new communication
strategies reflect,or indeed bring about,changes in internal corporate
behavior;whether differences in regulatory cultures (e.g.,U.S.v.U.K.v.EU)
are reflected in the corporate social responsibility behavior of individual
companies chartered in the respective jurisdictions;and,relatedly,whether
companies retain their home approach when they do business in places with
different regulatory cultures.The ultimate question,of course,is whether
the new behaviors demanded by the CSRmovement will amount to substance or
mere form.
Burns Cooper
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Justice à
la Mode:Potential pitfalls of electronic modes of courtroom discourse
Electronic modes of communicating and presenting information are becoming
increasingly common in courtrooms in the USA(mirroring their increased use in
other fields such as education and business).“E-courtrooms”and video
arraignments are increasingly accepted.In some cases,judges,prosecutors,
and defense attorneys are all pleased with such arrangements,both because
they can reduce the length of trials and because they make conveniences such
as speech-to-text transcription more feasible (e.g.,“E-Courtrooms Designed
to Reduce Trial Time,”AP,21September 2004).However,there are potential
downsides to electronic modes that should be considered before embracing them
wholesale.Linguists are well aware that transmission of words (putting
packets of information through a “conduit”)is only part of the work
accomplished by oral communication.Physical presence in the courtroom can
give important pragmatic cues to interpreting speech,including the physical
orientation of speakers,better access to facial expressions,gestures,and
perhaps intonational cues,and ease of recognizing who is talking at any one
time.For especially vulnerable defendants and witnesses,these cues can be
crucial to their ability to contribute meaningfully to the discourse and thus
(in the case of defendants)to their own defense.Lacking such cues can
undermine some of the most basic pragmatic and communicative principles,such
as the Gricean maxim of Relevance and some felicity conditions for speech
acts.This paper will survey the prevalence of certain electronic modes of
courtroom discourse,and then focus on a particular case in Fairbanks,Alaska,
in which a video arraignment of a mentally and physically disabled man may
have contributed to a highly problematic result.The paper will examine the
possibility that for persons whose ability to understand what is happening in
a legal case is compromised in some way to begin with (and this could include
not only the mentally disabled,but others such as the deaf,the blind,
persons of limited proficiency in English,and persons whose cultural
backgrounds involve assumptions about discourse that differ from the
prevailing legal culture),the abstraction and loss of nonverbal information
involved in incorporating electronic discourse may add to their disadvantage.
Richard Creech
Attorney-at-Law
Language
Law and Celtic Identity in the European Union
The Celts once
roamed over much of the land that now constitutes the European Union.Today,
however,speakers of Celtic languages (Irish,Welsh,Scots Gaelic and Breton)
are found mainly in isolated pockets on the periphery of this territory.This
paper examines how the EU’s legal system has interacted with these
languages,both with regards to their status within the EU’s own internal
organs as well as its effects on language policy within the three Member
States where Celtic languages are spoken.The EUdoes not accord the Celtic
languages the same treatment it bestows on other languages,nor does it treat
all Celtic languages equally.This variation flows from the differences in the
attitudes of Member States towards their respective Celtic identities,which
range from open (if ambiguous)celebration in Ireland,to tolerance in the
United Kingdom,to overt hostility in France.Irish,as the only Celtic
language from an officially Celtic state,is the only Celtic language that is
used in EUlegal settings,but it has been given a highly qualified status
that reflects the Irish Republic’s own ambivalence to its indigenous tongue.
The use of the Celtic languages within the various Member States is also
affected by the EU’s substantive economic law,as rules regarding domestic
language usage may run afoul of the treaty-based rights that citizens of the
EUhave to engage in free commercial movement throughout the Union.The
European Court of Justice in Groener v.Minister for Education (Case C-379/87,
1989ECR3987)considered the impact of an Irish-language requirement that
operated to deny a Dutch woman employment at an art college in Dublin.This
paper will analyze the Court’s opinion and discuss its implications for
language policy in other Celtic lands,with particular attention to the
linguistic situation in Wales.
Bart DeFrancq
Ghent University
Europe's
constitution:a terminological battleground
2004was one
of the most successful years for the European integration process,with
significant progress on the enlargement front with the accession of ten new
member States,but also on the integration front,with the adoption by the
European Council of a European Constitution.It seems,however,that Europe
has reached the limits of its potential to further enlarge or integrate.
Turkey's possible accession provokes strong reservations and the Constitution
itself seems to put an end to a tradition of visionary wording in the Treaties
that preceded it.My paper will focus on this and other aspects of the
language used in the Constitution and,particularly,on what the language
reveals about the negotiations that led to the Constitution.It will discuss
the efforts that have been made towards the use of plain language and a
greater transparency of the institutional terminology,but it will also
highlight the half-bakedness of many of the results (what is,for instance,a
/legislative function/or the /Community way/method/when the European
Community(ies)has(ve)ceased to exist?).On the basis of a comparison with
other constitutions and other European Treaties,Iwill argue that too much
progress on these two fronts would have brought the Constitution intolerably
close to the model of ordinary constitutions,which in the view of many and
not in the least of the Convention's Chairman was to be avoided.Iwill also
briefly touch upon the role played by the Académie française in
correcting the already approved draft version of the Constitution.
Du Jinbang
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
Information
Processing and Utilization in Courtroom Interactions
In the domain of legal language,courtroom discourse is representative of
information processing and utilization which constitute the core of the
interaction between participants in the courtroom.Thus the research into this
aspect may be illuminating for the whole process of courtroom trial.Some
researches of information processing mainly enquire into communication and
communication strategies.Others go further to focus on the linguistic aspect.
Both schools are contributive to research in courtroom discourse.The present
paper,in the light of previous research in communication and information
processing,tries to develop a model of information processing in the
courtroom setting.This model comprises three tiers:the first is the
interactive orientations of participants who often have different attitudes
toward a specific piece of information,and the social relations of the
participants as are formed in the courtroom context,on which the attitudes
are based;the second is the linguistic strategies which are employed by the
participants to realize their goals of communication;the third is the
specific linguistic devices used which are the embodiment of the strategies.
For setting up this model and testifying its feasibility,data are collected
from some Chinese courts.Cases of different kinds are included to ensure the
extensive applicability of the model.Though the model is to be set up in the
Chinese context,it may hopefully cast light upon similar studies of different
legal languages and in different legal contexts.One evident limitation is
that the model is a tentative exploration into information utilization in the
courtroom context.Alot of ensuing research has to be done before the model
is generally accepted as satisfactory.
Sandra Evans
The University of the West Indies,St.Augustine Campus,Trinidad and
Tobago.
The Use of
Court Clerks as ''Makeshift'Legal Interpreters in St.Lucian Courts
St.Lucia’s
legal system is modeled on British law and the official language of the law is
Standard English.However there are native St.Lucians who lack written and/or
spoken proficiency in English.These persons generally speak St.Lucian
French-lexicon Creole,which is the unofficial,national language of St.
Lucia.This language is not mutually intelligible with any form of English.
When these Creole-speaking persons appear as defendants,witnesses or victims
before the court,they require the assistance of a legal interpreter to
facilitate their comprehension of and participation in the court proceedings.
At present,there are no trained legal interpreters in French-lexicon Creole
in Saint Lucia.Consequently,as the need for an interpreter arises in the
courts,in both criminal and civil matters,a regular Clerk of Courts becomes
a ‘makeshift’legal interpreter.These Clerks play a crucial role in the
proceedings,as their interpretation determines what information is recorded
by the magistrate.This paper examines the inadequacies and implications of
using Court Clerks as makeshift legal interpreters in St.Lucian courts.It
also highlights some of the difficulties experienced by these interpreters
resulting from a lack of training and standardized procedures.
Lysbeth Ford and Dominic McCormack
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education,NT Australia and
MARLUK Link-Up,Darwin,NT Australia
The
Murrinh-patha Legal Glossary:a bridge between laws
This paper
reports on a ground-breaking project to produce a glossary of commonly-used
English legal terms in an Australian Indigenous language.It is a response to
the statistically significant incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians
whose limited command or complete lack of English puts them at a severe
disadvantage when they are confronted head-on by the Australian legal system.
Magistrates,police and legal aid services regularly find themselves hamstrung
by the lack of a common language to communicate with defendants,detainees and
clients alike.Indigenous interpreters,while fluent in the first language of
their clients,often lack sufficient specific English competency to be able to
decipher the meanings of English legal terms.Funded by the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and The Law Society
of the Northern Territory Public Purposes Trust,the project was undertaken by
Ford,an experienced linguist,several Murrinh-patha elders,John Sheldon,a
Darwin-based legal aid lawyer,and McCormack,a lawyer fluent in Murrinh-patha.
Murrinh-patha was chosen because it,rather than English or Kriol,is the
lingua franca of approximately 2,500Indigenous Australians in the Thamarrurr
Region,400km south-west of Darwin in the Daly River Aboriginal Land Trust
area of the Northern Territory of Australia,and the Kimberley region of
Western Australia.
The project
has had several successful outcomes:-
-a legal
glossary of the most commonly used English legal terms;
-increased understanding of the legal process by the Murrinh-patha elders who
worked on the project;
-increased understanding of the subtleties of Murrinh-patha by the
non-Indigenous researchers.
The glossary has also proved a useful pedagogical tool in the training of
Indigenous interpreters,because it consists largely of paraphrases which
provide an Australian Indigenous context for each legal concept.The rigour
with which it was conducted is evident in the morpheme by morpheme glosses
provided for each Murrinh-patha translation.
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