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
（三）
Weiming
Liu
Northwest University of Political Science
&Law,Xi'an,Shaanxi,P.R.China
Illocutionary
and Perlocutionary Acts in Chinese Judge’s Attached Discourse
From
2002to 2003,more and more courts in China are introducing some
judicial reforms.One of them is to improve trial language.In
these courts,the judges attach what they would like to say or
comment on the cases concerned to the end of court verdicts in a
written form.This is the judge’s attached discourse,which is
similar to obiter dictum,but not exactly the same.Since Shanghai
No.2Intermediate People’s Court took this special measure in
1998,there have appeared some doubts and strong oppositions.
These two quite different ideas have aroused heated academic
debate.This paper is to investigate and analyse the judge’s
attached discourse according to the theory --illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts,and try to prove its feasibility and
reasonableness,also its limitations.By analysing three civil
cases through linguistic theories,the paper shows that the
judge’s attached discourse really works.It is really
convincing.Just because of this,it can be called “tender court
decision”to some extent,and so we can come to the conclusion
that the judge’s attached discourse is feasible and reasonable.
In conclusion,the paper discusses three types of limitations and
problems the judge’s attached discourse has.Firstly,a
perlocutionary act does not have necessary connections with an
illocutionary act because many factors have an effect on the
consequence.Secondly,this problem triggers the second.—the
expressions of the attached discourse.The expressions should be
deeply studied and carefully advised,so as to bring in strong
illocotionary force and to move the litigants.Without proper
expressions,the judge’s attached discourse will not achieve the
expected perlocutionary act.Thirdly,the judge’s attached
discourse is mainly applicable to such cases as support for
parents and grandparents,bringing up children,succession,
divorce and the like.
Annelie Lotriet
University of the Free State,South Africa
Interpreting
Deception –An analysis of selected texts of the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Amnesty Hearings
One
of the important aims of,as well as prerequisites for amnesty
during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Amnesty Hearings,was that the truth be told.As most of the
testimony was interpreted,the question could be asked whether the
truth can be told without accurate interpreting.Did the
interpreters interpret everything,were there serious omissions,
incorrect facts (names,dates)?However,this question assumes
that what has been said during testimony is the truth.What
happens in cases where there is deception on the side of a
witness?Can and is deception conveyed by the interpreter?This
paper firstly focuses on the elements of accurate interpreting and
then sets out to evaluate the accuracy of the interpreting of two
selected sections of the Guguletu 7Hearings.In these two texts
two witnesses contradict one another during cross-examination.
Secondly,an analysis is made of the source texts by examining the
different linguistic styles indicative of deception.These include
aspects such as ambiguity,prolixity,assertiveness,elliptic
avoidment,depersonalization,etc.The same analysis is then made
of the target texts (the interpreted versions)and the results are
then compared to determine in the first instance whether deception
can be determined in the source texts and secondly whether the
interpreter’s linguistic style conveyed the same deception.
Carol Morgan
“What
happens”in child forensic interviewing:Increasing event detail
by improving narrative elicitation.
Problems
in child forensic interviews are usually of two types:quality
(answers tainted by poor memory or suggestive questioning,and
quantity (answers lacking detail).Research aiming to improve
these problems has often focused on improving quality—in
particular,avoiding specific and potentially suggestive
questioning.But such a focus,while important,is problematic.
Most practitioners know that overly specific questions are less
than ideal;what to replace them is less obvious.Attempts to
train interviewers to avoid specific questions often involve
grammatical terms and categories that are difficult to learn and
awkward to put into practice.In addition,the ‘general’
questions that are suggested to replace specific ones often fail
unexpectedly.For these reasons,efforts to improve interviews
should focus on identifying problems causing reduced quantity of
detail in child responses.Even if suggestive questioning is
eliminated,inadequate detail will remain and perhaps even worsen,
but focusing on quantity in addition to quality will improve both
quantity and quality.If the level of detail is improved,benefits
will include eliminating the need for the specific questions that
often are the last resort in interviewing a reticent child,and
the general questions that often are unsuccessful.One main
component in the strategy to improve quantity is to focus on
enhancing elicitation of narratives,which can give the greatest
amount of coherent and contextual detail without the pitfalls of
specific questions.This presentation will describe and explain
existing problems with the approach of teaching interviewers to
use general questions,and will highlight the conversation and
discourse features of a more successful interview that
concentrates on improving narratives.Specific strategies,
including improvements to the rapport section of the interview,
better narrative prompting,and practice and modeling of desired
responses,suggest the more promising possibilities of this type
of focus.
Luciana Romano Morilas
UNESP Araraquara,São Paulo,Brazil
Interaction
and power in written Brazilian forensic texts
In
Brazilian forensic context,written interaction is the main source
for the judges to know what problems the parties want to be
solved.In some processes there may be no oral interaction.
Therefore we analyze in written texts which strategies lawyers and
judges use to convince the addressers and show power.In Brazilian
civil lawsuits,parties are represented by their lawyers.It means
their voice is not apparent in the proceeding but what the lawyers
wrote according to what was said to them.Thus only the lawyer’s
speech is known and his/her power is clear in the written
interaction.The judge is going to decide according to what he/she
read in the petitions and according to the proofs brought to the
proceeding,which can be only written proofs.There is going to be
oral interaction only if the parties have any witness that they
want to be heard,but this will not be part of this present
analysis.Analyzing a case where there is no other proof than
written arguments only,we can realize which powerful attributes
are necessary to show power and reach the main objective:convince
the judge that his/her client has got the reason.These attributes
are 1)establishing a positive contact (causing positive
impression);2)using logic;3)using rhetoric arguments;4)using
interdiscoursivity;5)using specific convincing
syntactic-semantic constructions;6)organizing a clear,objective
and comprehensible text.These are the factors that must be
verified by lawyers when building their texts so that they may
convince the judge they must be the winners in the lawsuit.This
is part of doctor thesis results presented by the end of 2003at
UNESP,a state university in Brazil.
Ogone John Obiero
Maseno University,Kenya
Injustice
in Discourse of Cross-Examination
In
the legal domain,practitioners-judges,juries,lawyers,probation
personnel all execute their duties in line with certain
institutionalized relationships already formulated and existing in
the judicial system.This arrangement necessarily leads to the
unequal encounter between those in the legal arena and those
outside:accused and /or the cross-examined,such that rights
to control such encounters are attributed to the practitioners in
legal discourse.The effect this (unequal positioning in relation
to each other in the conventions of legal discourse)has on
justice is subject to investigation.And i pose-"with the
legal practicioners controlling and constraining the contribution
of the cross-examined,is it possible to find justice in the
courts?"This paper examines the control of text and talk in
the genre of cross-examination from the perspective of one of
Kenya's recent commission of inquiries-"the Goldenberg
commission of inquiry".
Farinde Raifu Olanrewaju
University of Wales,Bangor
Power
and Asymmetries in the Nigerian Courtroom System
The
focus of this study is the investigation of power and asymmetries
in the Nigerian courtroom system.It has already been argued that
there are power and asymmetries in institutional discourse.(see
Adelsward et al 1978,1988,Agar 1985,Atkinson and Drew 1979,
Danet 1984,Harris 1985etc)Courtroom discourse is essentially
power laden.This is so because the legal professionals are vested
with institutional authority and knowledge.Iam motivated to
study power and asymmetries in the Nigerian courtroom system
because in a non-native English speaking context such as Nigeria,
power and asymmetries are very pronounced.The study reveals among
other things that power and asymmetries in the courtroom situation
in Nigeria are synonymous with the lawyers/barristers’control
of the witnesses/accused persons through the type of questions
they ask.The study further reveals a lot of manipulation of
questioning forms by the barristers which enable them to control
witnesses/accused person’s testimony.For example,lawyers ask a
lot of leading questions such as declaratives questions,Tag
questions and Yes/no questions which structured the
witness/accused persons to the required answer.
‘Tunde Opeibi
University of Lagos,Nigeria
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE USE IN SELECTED
COURTROOM PROCEEDINGS IN NIGERIA
The law court is a sociolinguistic province where language is used
to accomplish specific purposes.The courtroom is particularly
differentiated from other settings because of the peculiar
linguistic exchanges that take place among the participants in
this universe of discourse.As an institutional setting,laid-down
procedures usually dictate the conducts of the interactants with
respect to what they can say and how they say what they can say.
To the average citizens who are laymen,language use in court
proceedings is mystified,coded and ‘strange’(Tiersma,1999).
The situation becomes more worrisome when one considers the fact
that the law,which is expected to be a communal property,is
couched in a language that alienates about 70%of Nigerian
population.This paper examines the significant features of
language use in legal proceedings/courtroom discourse in Lagos,
Nigeria.The approaches of discourse analysis and selected
concepts from the Speech Act Theory (Austin,1962&Searle,
1969)provide the framework for the description and analysis of
the linguistic exchanges in the courts.It utilises extracts from
texts recorded from criminal and civil proceedings from Yaba
Magistrate Court in Lagos metropolis.The study provides insights
into the communicative strategies in an L2courtroom setting.
Different discourse acts are identified and coded.The analysis
and interpretation of other lexico-semantic and non-linguistic
features found in the texts produced during the proceedings
demonstrate the technicalities that characterise legal language.
The survey conducted within and outside the court premises
confirms the assumption that much of the Nigerian legal system is
far removed,language wise,from the generality of the population
whom these laws govern(Adetugbo,1990).The study thus raises the
question on the viability and appropriateness of the choice
English as the language of legal proceedings in non-native
environments.It argues that a more acceptable linguistic code
should be adopted to perform this very important regulatory
function in the society.
Alma Ortiz
CELE-UNAM-MÉXICO Foreign Language
Learning Centre –National Autonomous University of México.
Testing
the Reading Ability of University Law Students in Mexico.
The
Testing Department of the Foreign Language Learning Centre at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico is responsible for
certifying the reading ability of Law students (nearly 1000per
year)as a graduating requirement.The challenges in creating a
valid and reliable bank of exams for undergraduates and graduates
lie in selecting the texts and designing the exams with the
appropriate techniques.Efforts have been made in the selection of
appropriate texts,mainly due to the fact that these students have
no formal training in reading English.Neither their teachers or
courses demand them to read texts in English,but still they have
to take a graduating requirement in Reading Comprehension.Text
designers’criteria rely on text accessibility,topic,and
readability.One of the text designers has a B.A.in Law,
therefore acting as the law consultant for the rest.The Flesch
formula as a very first simple step to measure the texts’
readability is used;a second step is the comparison of a sample
of the text against Nation’s Academic List of University
Vocabulary.Some initial results,after these two measures,have
indicated the level of readability for possible exams at different
study level of Law students (undergraduate,graduate and
postgraduate students).The most popular assessing technique has
been ‘multiple choice’,last year ‘cloze’as a testing and
readability technique for this population was introduced.
‘Cloze’created a very adverse reaction and the Department
decide not to use it anymore with this population;Science and
Psychology students have been tested with ‘cloze’for a long
time but no negative reaction was provoked.The paper will share
findings in an on going research on text readability and its
implications in the designing of language requirement exams.
María Ángeles Orts
Universidad de Murcia
Business,company or corporation?The hidden dimension to
contemplate when translating Company Law into Spanish.
Like
the languages of many other social activities,the language of the
law is widely considered as culturally bound.In line with this
assertion,and departing from Edward T.Hall’s assumptions
regarding the cultural dimension as the “hidden dimension”of
communication,this study tries to highlight the fact that legal
culture vastly influences legal interaction and,hence,varies
from system to system.Accordingly,the attempt to translate
Company Law from Legal English –either British or American-
into Legal Spanish,taking into consideration cultural variance,
involves a great deal of complexity as far as terminological
equivalence is concerned.Such a complexity is regarded in the
present article as resulting from the culturally different ways in
which the corporate world is contemplated,both from the point of
view of the Common Law and the Spanish Continental systems.
Through a detailed analysis of the peculiarities of Corporate
legislation in these different systems,a discussion on the
possibility of terminological equivalence is established,and some
solutions for translation provided.From sole proprietorships to
joint corporations,through partnerships and private limited
companies,explanations will be supplied as to membership,
liability,possibility of collapse and other specific legal
requirements for each kind of business structure,considering the
similarities and differences found in the systems mentioned above.
In addition,the clarifications and results supplied will try to
arouse the awareness of the pragmatic side of legal translation as
a basic starting point for the translator’s task.
Viktoria Papp
Rice University,Houston TX
Perception
of similar voices and the similarity criterion in voice lineups
Several
factors may render a voice lineup (voice parade)biased and
therefore inadmissible as evidence.This presentation focuses on
one of these factors,the similarity between the voice quality of
the suspect and the foils used in the identity parade.The goal of
the experiments was to measure the perceived voice similarity with
the help of pair-wise comparisons.The perceptual results of the
four groups,foreign vs.native,lay vs.phonetically trained
subjects,were compared against objective measurements of the main
acoustic correlate of pitch,the fundamental frequency.In
analyzing the confusion matrices,five patterns were discussed at
all subject groups:1)accuracy in recognizing the same-speaker
pairs,2)false positives,3)false negatives,4)“runners-up”
(speaker(s)with whom a speaker is most frequently confused),and
5)the confidence of the decisions.It is suggested that this
method of correlating acoustic and perceptual data on pitch,
together with other perceptually based measurements,can be used
in both preparing a voice identity parade,and analyzing the
outcome thereof.The measured accuracy and confidence in the two
experiments were used to evaluate the admissibility of speaker
voice recognition by foreign vs.native,and lay vs.phonetically
trained witnesses.The results showed that when subjects are given
less information to work with,the recognition accuracy rate
indeed exhibits a serious drop.In these situations the
“confusability relation”(caused by altered proximities in the
acoustic perceptual space)changed between speakers,but not in
the same way.The speakers suffering more misidentification
pattern consistently differently for native and non-native
speakers of English,and also for lay and trained witnesses.With
the decline of recognition accuracy,the rate of false positives
and false negatives both increased significantly in all groups,
but the pattern of increase differed from group to group.
Amy
Pi-Chan Hu
National Cheng-chi University,Taipei,
Taiwan
A
Case Study on Cognition and Second Language Acquisition:The
Mountain Is Ours
Pronouns
are semantically degenerate,and thus do not contain sufficient
information to name the individual to which they are intended to
refer,therefore their uncertain nature commonly produces errors
in interpretation.Our understanding of a pronoun is affected by
three separate factors:the pronoun’s case,number and gender;
the syntactic structure within which the pronoun is placed;and
the context in which it is used.Unfortunately,the language and
the context do not always specify which antecedent is meant.Every
specialized field develops its own technical jargon,therefore
technical discourse is vital to avoid misunderstandings between
different fields.In ROCv.Wang,decided in 2004by the Chia-yi
District Court,the court quoted the record of the accused saying
during his interrogation,“The mountain is ours,so the honey is
ours,”(which was translated from Tsou,an aboriginal language
in Taiwan,into Chinese)to signify the accused’s intention to
rob the victim,and found the accused guilty as charged.Wang,an
aboriginal chief of the Tsou tribe,has a limited knowledge of
Chinese.This paper will focus on the interpretation of the
pronouns “we”and “our(s)”in Tsou and Chinese,the nature
of the language deficiency of the aboriginal people,and the
availability of trained interpreters during trials.From a
linguistic viewpoint,every word has its own mental space in the
individual’s mind.This paper will reconstruct these two words,
in order to determine what caused the different interpretations
between the accused and the judges.Despite the emphasis on
precision in law,it is undeniable that language remains vague in
its own domain.Moreover,aboriginals frequently communicate in
ways that are unfamiliar to people of non-aboriginal descent,
which can lead to misunderstandings in a courtroom.
Richard Powell
Nihon Unversity,Tokyo
Motivations
for codeswitching in Malaysian courtrooms
Malaysia's
legal system is relatively unusual in formally assigning roles to
two languages:Malay and English.While Malay is the de jure
medium of court submissions and proceedings,English is readily
admissible without interpretation at the discretion of the court,
and is the de facto medium of a minority of lower court cases and
a majority of interactions in the higher courts.This overall
pattern is complicated by endemic Malay-English codeswitching,
again with the former tending to predominate in the lower courts
and the latter in the upper.Various types and degrees of
codeswitching may be identified in Malaysian courtrooms,from
embedding lexical items or cultural idioms from one language into
discourse primarily in the other,through altering the medium
according to the perceived formality of a speech-act,to shifting
languages when switching interlocutors and also maintaining
extended mixed-code discourse with the same interlocutor.Whilst
shifting education policies have certainly produced uneven
linguistic competence across generations,this paper,based on
observation of criminal and civil proceedings in both lower and
higher courts,is more concerned with strategic explanations for
courtroom codeswitching.One question to be addressed is whether
microlinguistic considerations such as convergence and divergence
among lawyers and between lawyers and witnesses are as influential
as macrolinguistic factors such as national language policy and
professional training.Another question is whether Malaysian
courtrooms bear out claims that codeswitching in Malaysia,unlike
in most multilingual societies,is prevalent not only in informal
but also in formal registers.It will be suggested here that the
lesser-used language (i.e.English in the lower courts and Malay
in the higher)frequently becomes a resource for establishing
intimacy and informality among interlocutants.
Judith Rochecouste &Rhonda Oliver
Monash University and Edith Cowan
University,Australia
Evidential
Strategies Used By Expert Witnesses
Evidential
devices in academic and similar professional discourses express
attitudes to knowledge and are commonly used to moderate or hedge
statements in anticipation of criticism by peers.In the
courtroom,however,different criteria apply where more
unequivocal or definitive expression of knowledge is required.
This places very different demands on the language use of expert
witnesses from academic professions.While some hedging devices
are accepted from expert witnesses to express opinion and
hypothesis,in a controversial Australian trial numerous other
strategies were used by expert witnesses which moderated the
reliability of the expert evidence presented.This paper
demonstrates the range of linguistic strategies which expert
witnesses used to appear to conform to the discourse requirements
of the courtroom;to avoid categorical claims through hedging,
qualification,etc;to engender favour with the presiding judge;
and to reinforce power relations and responsibilities between the
expert witnesses themselves and counsel.In this trial,expert
witnesses for the defence exhibited many of these strategies.
Expert witnesses appearing for the prosecution,on the other hand,
used more unequivocal statements,even though these witnesses were
unable to interview the accused.While hedging by witnesses will
not be new to the legal fraternity,an understanding of the range
and complexity these strategies can alert counsel to further ways
to counter evidence against their respective cases.The study also
has implications for the training of witnesses and for advising
juries when summing up in that it expands consideration of ‘what
is said’to include ‘how it is said’and what impact this
has on the reliability of the evidence.
Frances Rock
Roehampton University
Writing rights right or writing them off?The utility of
written rights information in police custody
In
England and Wales,people arrested by the police have five main
rights which are explained through speech,to some extent,but
predominantly through writing.This paper explores a recent
attempt to revise the system for administering rights in
Anglo-Welsh Police stations.The paper begins by sketching the
background of the rights administration system.It then explores
lexical,syntactic and discoursal aspects of current and previous
rights texts,illustrating the degree to which those texts use or
avoid such features as jargon,grammatical metaphor,subordination
and their ways of dealing with such characteristics as
intertextuality.Having provided a linguistic snapshot of written
rights texts in this way,the paper then examines the place of
rights administration in custody using interviews with police
officers and detainees and ethnographic observation of police
station.This more sociolinguistic section of the paper supports
the assertion that rights texts cannot be considered in isolation
from their uses and users.It illustrates this by demonstrating
whether and how the texts are appropriated.This section considers
how many detainees read,or even receive,written rights texts and
considers how rights are communicated,both inside and outside
detention,if not through the prescribed written texts.This
section also considers pragmatic aspects of rights administration,
presenting evidence that responding to rights texts is about more
than just invoking or waiving rights.The paper concludes by using
the work presented to review current Government policy on rights
administration.
Robert Rodman,Erik Eriksson and Robert
Hubal
North Carolina State University,USA,Umeå
University,Sweden and RTI International,North Carolina,USA
Deducing
emotions from speech:Forensic implications
Computational
forensic linguistics implies the use of computing systems to
analyze language and speech for forensic purposes.For example,
speaker identification and authorship determination are two
interest areas of this broad field.Another interest area is the
automatic detection of the emotional state of a person based on
visual and aural clues.Here,we focus specifically on emotion
detection based on vocal affect during speech.Automatic emotion
detection from speech brings together two seemingly disparate
areas:the psychology of emotions and speech signal processing.
The former concerns itself with the taxonomy of human emotions and
their interaction.The latter,as it applies here,concerns itself
with the acoustic cues of any vocal affect that accompanies a
particular emotion,and is therefore one means of detecting the
presence of that emotion.In this paper we review and summarize
the copious amount of research that has taken place with regard to
defining emotions and scales along which to measure them,and with
regard to defining acoustic cues and correlating them to emotional
states with particular degrees of certainty.Throughout our focus
is on forensic implications.We also scrutinize present-day
databases being used for emotion detection studies,and address
the question of what characteristics should be sought for such a
database.For example,is it effective to use actors to create
emotion data?Should emotion data be collected and processed with
a certain application area in mind?We also address the question
of speaker and cultural dependencies that may be encountered in
automatic emotion detection.No computer system exists today that
takes speech as input and unequivocally produces the emotional
state of the speaker as output.But work is progressing toward
such a goal.We speculate—and invite conference participants to
join us—as to where in forensic processes such a computer system
would prove useful.Some examples are jury selection,witness
interrogation,and courtroom speech such as summation statements.
Terry Royce
Teachers College,Columbia University
(Tokyo,Japan)
The
Negotiator and the Bomber:an interactive analysis of active
listening in crisis negotiations
McMains
and Mullins (2001)suggest that one of the most important skills
for a police negotiator to be able to settle a crisis is to have
considerable expertise in ‘discussing or conferring”,and that
integral to this is the ability to hear what the other person is
saying.In other words,the negotiator needs to be proficient at
Active Listening.Active listening as an interpersonal skill is
taught and utilised across a wide range of communicational
contexts,some of which include:dispute resolution and mediation;
self-help and parenting advice;journalism;sales and marketing
techniques;marital,religious and educational counselling;and
phone-in suicide prevention.Its specific definition varies based
on the ways that it is approached in these various contexts,but
generally it deals with listening constructively,with a focus on
an understanding of the other person's feelings,or empathising
with them to build rapport.This paper extends Hammer and
Rogan’s (in Rogan,Hammer,&Van Zandt,1997)
communication-based,interactive model of crisis negotiation by
examining the role of active listening by a Police negotiator in
New South Wales,Australia in the serving of a “high-risk
warrant”on an armed and dangerous perpetrator who is expected
to resist.Through an analysis of the interaction between the
perpetrator and the negotiator,this paper demonstrates that the
use of active listening in the early stages of the negotiation
sets the foundation for the resolution of this crisis.
References
McMains M.J.and W.C.Mullins.(2001).2nd Ed.Crisis
Negotiations:Managing critical incidents and hostage situations
in law enforcement and corrections.Cincinnati:Anderson Pub.Co.
Rogan,R.G.,M.R.Hammer,and C.Van Zandt.(1997).Dynamic
Processes of Crisis
Negotiation.Westport,Connecticut:Praeger.
Royce,T.(forthcoming)“The Negotiator and the Bomber:an
interactive analysis of the critical role of active listening in
crisis negotiations”,Negotiation Journal 21(1),(January 2005).
Marta Sanchez,Jaume Llopis and M.
Teresa Turell
Institut Universitari de Lingüística
Aplicada,Universitat Pompeu Fabra,Barcelona
Intra
and Inter-author comparisons:the case of function Words:Are
function words really functional in stylometric studies of
authorship attribution?
Stylometric
analyses of function words for forensic linguistic purposes
haven’t been very productive.In our view this is due to the
fact that these analyses have been either purely qualitative or
exclusively quantitative.The purpose of this paper is to use
different approaches to the data -only qualitative,only
quantitative,or a combination of both qualitative and
quantitative -in order to establish which is the best way of
showing that function words are very idiosyncratic traits of an
author’s style,both in terms of frequency and use,and can be
used as markers of authorship in intra and inter-author
comparisons.The hypothesis is that if type-token ratios already
provide significant results as to the differences in use of
lexical words between authors,an analysis of the differences
shown by functions words would help to narrow this inter-author
dimension and thus be relevant in stylometric studies of
authorship attribution.The corpus consisted of 120newspaper
articles written in Spanish by 6different authors (20articles
each),including different varieties of Spanish,in order to avoid
reducing the study to peninsular Spanish.Once the texts had been
processed with SCPand Wordsmith,the density of function words
vis-à-vis lexical words in each text was calculated and a list
with the five most frequent words was devised.In this case,an
index of similarity drawn from Genetics was developed,by
calculating the similarity values of each text in relation to all
the other texts,in order to be able to establish whether the
similarity index was closer between the texts written by the same
author (intra-author)than between the texts written by different
authors (inter-author).
Roger Shuy
Georgetown University
When
All Else Fails,Be Ambiguous:A Prosecution Strategy in the
International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia
Ambiguity
is one of the favorite conversation strategies used by law
enforcement to create the illusion of criminality.When
interrogators are deceptive or ambiguous in the way they seek
information from suspects,the chance of getting a conviction
greatly increases.One of the defendants accused of genocide in
the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was difficult
for the prosecutors to crack.After failing to get from him
anything inculpatory,they resorted to using four ambiguity
strategies in their questioning,apparently hoping that Major
Dragan Jokic would stumble and give the appearance of involvement.
This paper describes how the prosecutors conducting the interviews
used these four ambiguity strategies:
1.confusing what the major "knew"with what he merely
"heard about"after the fact
2.confusing his involvement in "passing along an order"
to send and use digging machines to bury the dead in Srebrenica
with his having been asked about the availability of such machines
3.mixing their questions about what actually happened with
hypothetical questions about what "could have"happened.
4.using ambiguous referencing in their questions,leading to
confusion about who and what was being discussed,when and where.
Despite
the major's surprisingly good resistance to such ambiguity,he was
indicted and tried for committing genocide.At the time of this
writing,the trial is still in progress.
Peter Smith and Gea de Jong
City University,London
Speaker
Identification:Function Words and Beyond
Speaker
identification of audio material in a forensic context would be
carried out by a phonetician who produces a report on the
likelihood that the samples are by the same speaker.Recently,
larger volume transcriptions have become available that makes it
possible to also carry out a linguistic analysis with a view to
speaker identification.We envisage this to be complementary to,
rather than as an alternative to a phonetic analysis of the audio
material.Function word based approaches to stylometric analysis
have achieved some impressive results in author identification of
written texts.Significant problems arise when applying these
technique to forensic data.There is the problem of data volume:
forensic samples are much smaller than literary texts.There is
the difficulty in handling transcribed spoken data and the problem
of transcription which often introduces errors into the data.
Stylometric analyses using multivariate function word frequency
distributions show some interesting patterns in the data.We have
noted a consistently greater variance with some function words
than others these words tend to be those that are used in a wider
range of grammatical constructs.For example,the function word
“that”has some 28different grammatical uses.We also
observed that speakers tend to use function words in a
consistently different pattern to others.Our test for speaker
identification is based on this observation.We examined seven
pieces of forensic text,all of them transcriptions of audio
material.These are a mixture of police interviews and recorded
telephone conversations.Using this data,we examined the usage of
different function words in different grammatical constructs,
paying particular attention to features such as discourse markers.
We propose that this analysis can be used to accompany and
strengthen a phonetic analysis.Preliminary results are promising
and we are also examining ways of producing a precise statistical
test.
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2005年7月18日 |
